The Flow Of Music: Two Poems From Moya Cannon

VIOL


Wherever music comes from
it much come through an instrument.
Perhaps that is why we love the instrument best
which is most like us--


a long neck,
a throat that loves touch,
gut,
a body that resonates,


and life, the bow of hair and wood
which works us through the necessary cacophonous hours,
which welds dark and light into one deep tone,
which plays us, reluctant, into music.




VIOLA D'AMORE


Sometimes love does die,
but sometimes, a stream on porous rock,
it slips down into the inner dark of a hill,
joins with other hidden streams
to travel blind as the white fish that live in it.
It forsakes one underground streambed
for the cave that runs under it.
Unseen, it informs the hill,
and, like the hidden strings of the viola d'amore,
makes the hill reverberate,
so that people who wander there
wonder why the hill sings,
wonder why they find wells.


--Moya Cannon