The Influence on Music
He sees notes he wrote for his wife.
Notes that curl together
moving from a low register to a high one,
rapidly in a way only the most fluent
flutist can play.
Notes like staccato dancers move across
the stage dressed in midnight blue
tights and gold spotted tunics.
What were the influences that helped
irony swarm from note to note?
Clever child reaching for God
in a sycamore tree - afraid to come down.
His Grandmother calls to him, “Please dear,
come down.” But he stays high in the tree.
Tears falling from his large brown eyes.
Afraid he’ll fall. Knowing his
Grandmother cannot come up
in her French cotton floral dress.
She cannot remove her heavy black shoes,
her silk stockings, nor pull her dress up
tucked in its belt
Climb up to him,
carry him down.
She pleads with him to muster
the courage to hold onto the limb.
“Feel with your feet for the lower limb,
slowly nudge your body down the trunk.”
Then asks him to repeat this action until
she can reach him and hold him
“Please Pete.” she tries again.
Forty years later he comes out of a room in Carcasonne,
spies his two middle children
carefully walking the medieval walls
of the fortress. His 7 year old
daughter, up there high
with her older brother, she is laughing with him
trying to keep up and follow not only
his footsteps, but his fantasy
fighting the Spaniards, protecting
the Normans, commanding his
armored army to follow him
onward, high up on the wall.
Father is afraid of the height
his children have forged.
He cannot climb the wall of stone
in his bucks and carry
his young daughter down. Will she
get stuck when she sees how far down
she has to jump?
He is paralyzed as they laugh.
His daughter does not fall nor stop to worry
about spraining an ankle nor dirtying
her white cotton shirt.
She was confused by her father’s fear.
His son took his sister up a wall of an ancient fortress.
Never thought he couldn’t help her down.
He could do anything for her.
He could protect her from anything
but their father’s fears and the complexity
of a suite written for flute.
Can the audience hear the highs and low of
the musical suite written for flute?
Can we find his fear of heights,
his closeness to God or
his frivolous laughing children?
Can we find his love for his children?
For his son’s imagination and his courage?
Can we find his love for his wife’s precision with
an instrument that shrills if nor played right?
Can we hear the influences that cause
his notes to swirl and dance,
flickering across one’s ear?
