#211 Kevin Brophy Music

#211 Music

The mind can sing, sometimes the voice can too.

A small word, an even smaller bird, the way

the ants have rolled the desert sand into tiny peas,

stacked them outside their colonies as monuments

in shades of ochre, these too are ways of singing.

I miss you now and must sing you in my mind

and hear this music in my legs and in the many

creatures of my panic bumping in the dark in me,

yes, the mind can sing, the choir and the orchestra

prepared, a woman sits there too, guitar

upon her lap, a young man dreamily about to knock

his tambourine against one hand or possibly his hip.

I miss you now and all my mind can do is sing

of you, of your absence, and it sounds like every

song ever sung, it sounds as if the music’s always

been for you to come upon. The mind can sing,

it can twist the heart into rags and wake all the

creatures of the dark inside and all of this no more

than the music of an absence in the air. I sketch

your shape with every move of my hand in the air,

I conduct the music of your absence in every breath,

the orchestra is watching for the smallest movement

to be turned to music that the mind can sing inside

the heart until you come upon it.