Today, life sent me this poem. Maybe it was in honor of my late grandfather's 100th birthday. Or of my grandmother's passing, also sharing this date. Anyhow, I had seen this poem before.
It is one that my dad wrote, many years ago, while listening to Barber's Adagio for Strings, on an airplane. As he struggled to contemplate his existence, and his place in all other existence.
It had resurfaced a few years ago, when he was ill and contemplating the end to his existence, or at least the existence he knew.
I have been reading The Road, by Cormack McCarthy, and the story of a man and his boy clinging tenuously to the last morsels of post-apocalyptic survival on a destroyed earth is enough to make anyone contemplate the true nature of existence at its core.
So, today I sat, stubbornly banging my head against questions that leave me at an impasse. Answerable only with other questions that seem to have no answers. And then a distant, but significant voice from the past manifested, as if on cue, and strategically plunked these familiar words before my eyes.
In Tempo Adagio
by Alan Miller
Subtle, rich harmonic changes;
their lyrical form framing the view
of tortuous, ribboned paths, etched
along the mountainous divide
which keenly separates
chaos from order
virtue from abandon
treachery from expedience;
one gentle step on the other side of which
brings the quivering, raw, vulnerable beat to a halt.
Images appear deliberately; stop-time irony
as the fleeting shadow of wings inquisitively
searches every incline, crevasse and flood plain
for meaning, and finding none, moves on.
I walk on that path, straddling comfort and anguish,
sometimes thoughtlessly and urgently
like the searching darting shadow;
sometimes almost motionlessly,
as the perspective onto which the reckless vision is cast,
in tempo adagio
as I sift through collective treasures
of memories and aspirations.
Passing awarely through thick layers
of turbulence and obscurity,
I reach the defined edge of light,
bordered by the melodic tones
and the deepening blueness of the final breadth of our world.
Cast above the clouds, I stare awkwardly
at the gift bestowed upon me.
The last chord finds me
suspended, at peace, outstretched,
leaning towards enlightened times.
And the quandary became a little more clear. The answers have always been there. It is the questioner that continually changes.
In Tempo Adagio
by Lauren Valantine
The portal is wide open tonight,
like the stretched light of a full moon,
fleeting illumination on the elusive.
Life and death in perpetual motion,
through the orbit of day following night.
Communications encrypted, drawn out
repeated as needed
to make their meanings whole.
First round, a revelation
Second, new understanding of the very same
Third, time steeped with the experience of past tense, of after. Of before.
Messengers weaving, leaping
through a convolution of time and minds.
The answers in tempo adagio.
