Three more, Lawn Concert.
I had to ask last night if you had those here,
like Tanglewood, playing outside music.
It sounds like.
Lawn Concert.
They may have come to hear about love,
or blank pain that stays blank until music
makes a shape for it.
So to know it, so to feel it out.
But for whatever reasons of their own,
the lovers swarm here in throngs.
Paired hand in hand, blankets under arms,
wine bottles swinging by the necks
like pendulums of old clocks.
And music is a good excuse for picnics in the lush night air,
but when it begins and she begins to listen,
a woman may tell how she loves the man.
The way her back inclines sitting next to him.
By the way she freely touches him,
as if there were no limits to her touch.
As if there were no touch they haven't known,
and she believes that he's the one from whom
to take essential sustenance and feels no need
to seek it in anyone else.
I've never felt this way myself, maybe
it happens for only a few moments in a life.
The other couples near my blanket
make other arrangements.
Sitting upright in lawn chairs, or scattered on the grass.
One man lies on his side with his back to his wife.
His head pillowed on the inside of his wrist,
while she sits hugging her knees to her breasts,
as if they had argued and switched off the light.
But soon we're all drawn inside the symphony,
the air suffused with music and we breathe it.
And darkness will thicken, so those around me
are just black shapes, melded or apart.
So I lie back, my eyes wide,
listening hard, to watch the crossing
of the music and the stars.
To feel myself nothing, but some chance
meeting of the endless space and endless inwardness.
I even half expect some inhuman voice
to tell me how to embrace the constant underlying
silence that surfaces in this music
and shows the bow strokes, clean as brushstrokes
on a white canvas, but there's none of this.
Only the thought of lovers lying down right now.
Their touches useless, or tender, or electric.