Virtuosa
Ricki Mandeville At last the cello surrenders, allows my deft fingers to coax from it a music of passion and grief. I draw out fragile birds and red hibiscus blooms and lightning that writes your name in spiky letters across an onyx sky. Playing on, I conjure our children, two girls with great sheaves of light glinting from their chestnut hair (so like yours, my love) and then, in a minor key, a glowing shard of moon that hurls itself over the side of the bridge (again like you, my love) and ripples its light like so many knife edges across the hungry river. I own the strings, I wield the bow with such heartbreaking ease! I play your name again and again: dirge, requiem, etude, sonata. I play, and watch the waves intently for some sign of you. At last your head rises streaming from the black water and then your pale hand, waving to me. And still I play on, summoning you toward me until my fingers ache and my hand cramps in the shape of the stringed throat. I play on until morning and the first faint stripe of sunlight across the empty bed. In Gray after a photograph by George Gekas On the old boat launch there’s a light sift of snow, though it hasn’t yet stuck to the ground. I like it this way, at the onset of hard weather, caught between white and black, its bones creaking in water that tends toward ice, will rim itself in another month. Across the lake, buildings wear capes of snow. The morning feels like twilight, silent and struck gray by winter’s whim, a single shade for water and sky, a darker value for the pointed heads of pines on the other side, their green turned charcoal from this distance. I’ve stood in this spot two hundred times but today I see it otherwise: an unfamiliar village rising from the water line, a place I’ve never entered and where anything might happen. I hear its grays singing to mine: my long coat of gray wool, my black boots long since scuffed to gray. Gray gloves, gray eyes, gray mood. Look. A breath of fog draws itself like ashen silk across the shoulders of the houses, though, from here, I can’t be certain which is mine. |
About the author:
Ricki Mandeville’s poems have appeared in Comstock Review, San Pedro River Review, Pea River Journal, Texas Poetry Calendar 2014, 2015, 2016, Penumbra and other journals. She is co-founder and consulting editor of Moon Tide Press and the author of A Thin Strand of Lights (Moon Tide Press). A speaker for various literary events, she lives near the ocean in Huntington Beach, California. |