Music is everywhere.
If you ride an escalator in a department store,
jingles will float across the airwaves.
You can complain to upper management,
or dismiss the kind assistant with impudence,
nursing your entitlement to be angry—
your only child has died.
You can press both palms against your ears
but the melody will sneak in,
the way a sunbeam slips through a slit in a blind.
You can stay home, close the windows,
remove the wind chimes from your deck,
tinkling Pachelbel’s Canon in D
but a workman mending a pipe in the street
will whistle: always look on the bright side of life.
There’s nothing you can do about it.
Music will pry open your heart,
bound tight with sorrow like cabbage leaves,
and there will come a day,
perhaps driving across the Golden Gate Bridge,
a cool breeze mussing your hair,
when you hear a song on a car radio
and before you know it,
your fingers are tapping the wheel.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kaye Cleave is a Bay Area writer who lives half the year in Australia, enjoying an endless summer. She has an MFA in writing from the University of San Francisco, a PhD in creative writing from the University of Adelaide, Australia and was a research scholar at UC Berkeley. Her book of poems, Cartwheels of Love and Loss will be available from Redbird Chapbooks at the end of the year, and she is seeking a publisher for her memoir, My Beautiful, Reckless Girl. Kaye has taught poetry at a maximum security prison in California and currently co-leads grief and loss seminars at Laguna Writers in San Francisco. To learn more about Kaye, visit her website kaye-cleave.com