(This Life) Part 8: Love and The Clarinet Maker

(This Life) Part 8: Love and The Clarinet Maker

“echoes within echoes of echoes

I’m woken at the witching hour,

echoes of echoes within echoes…”

 

At precisely 16 past 6

They emerge from their snot-green house

On their way to the KGV -

Loola waiting, their table set,

Coffee black for him, hers a tea,

And a shared breakfast of fried kidneys –

The faint smell of The Liffey strong

In their wake as they pass the tall grass

That licks and laps The Great Oak’s root,

He the spit of James  - black hatted,

Shirt immaculate, trousers sharp –

And she, Maeve, hair wet, dripping still

From the music of his skilled hands,

The very same which have cut and shaped

The curve and bore of clarinets

These past forty years and more.

 

I’ve watched his hands work the lathe –

on Open Artist Studio days –

the lengths of wood precisely shorn,

the joints submerged then in oil

while his mastery was turned

to the making of the keys,

each subtle signature unique,

the demonstration attended

by a siren’s song that rose full

A throated from the room beyond.  

 

Bewitched I’d listened, the sound black,

Re-drawing me.

                            Disassembled

I’d spun

green as the first fruit -

its fruit, the fruit of all fruits -

dissolving in the sound,  its webs

magical              

spinning            

pulling

then just as I began to drown

opened another, music morning bread sweet,

a white rush of notes -  his clarinet -

joining in the flow soft and thin,

gentle as the touch of flowers,

his breath and hers, his heart and hers

fusing, nesting in that space

between day and night and I awed

could only watch their love’s passion play,

born of itself,  a symphony,

the universe itself

pregnant

impossible

miraculous.

 

rises in me echoes of echoes,

echoes within echoes of echoes,

echoes of echoes within echoes,

of you and I, our shared odyssey,

sails first unfurled in Dublin’s City.

 

Each day I watch them stride past the Plough,

Their shadows touching, lengthening,

Love wrapped into the loose twist of their hands.