“I want to stay in that music without striving or cover.
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If the truth of our lives is what it is playing,”
– Annie Lighthart
We think about intimacy as something to experience with other people. When we get quieter, when we pay attention, the potential for an intimacy with life itself ripens. This kind of intimacy is an experience often felt paradoxically as softer yet stronger. It is not forgotten. The richness sparked by even a moment of touching into intimacy with life is so completely moving, so wholly fulfilling, that it may become what we seek to find again, and again. Carl Jung wrote that “Intellectualism is a common cover-up for fear of direct experience,” and in Annie Lighthart’s poem, we find the speaker searching through the noise and distractions to rediscover the treasure of the direct experience of what she hears as ‘the second music’, the quiet pulse of a benevolent hum that animates and holds us all.
Posted by Guest Editor Sam Shapiro
The Second Music
Now I understand that there are two melodies playing,
one below the other, one easier to hear, the other
lower, steady, perhaps more faithful for being less heard
yet always present.
When all other things seem lively and real,
this one fades. Yet the notes of it
touch as gently as fingertips, as the sound
of the names laid over each child at birth.
I want to stay in that music without striving or cover.
If the truth of our lives is what it is playing,
the telling is so soft
that this mortal time, this irrevocable change,
becomes beautiful. I stop and stop again
to hear the second music.
I hear the children in the yard, a train, then birds.
All this is in it and will be gone. I set my ear to it as I would to a heart.
Annie Lighthart
From: Iron String
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