Life Is Music

I walk to work and spy
an old woman on the porch of a brownstone,
humming a song with an ethnic drawl
while she knits behind wrought iron rails,
a song I don’t recognize
from the sidewalk below,
a song lost moments later
to the motored groan of vehicles
on narrow roads.
As the day ends
and darkness etches retreat of light,
I pass her portico again
to hear the enchanting drone
from her silhouette above,
an indistinct sound which ushers
silent nightfall to calm the day.
Her melody follows me
down the slender sidewalks,
pass centers of bureaucracy,
to the great ocean ports
where I walk for hours upon the pavilions
and occasionally visit a tavern
where the old men relive a memory
in a verse of love’s defeat
or the greener grass of home,
the song mollifies their angst
with drips of melancholy.
I return to my room,
lie awake in my bed
and rehearse the meaning of those events
which shaped my day,
a day that began when the sun cleared
the steeples of industry
and flashed my eyes with a flood of light
to trigger the dust of a beginning
that arose from nowhere
and led to reminiscences of the song
I will create.