When Bach was a Busker in Brandenburg

When Bach was a busker playing for humble coin
he’d set up his organ in the middle of a square
regardless of pigeons, ignoring the squirrels who sat
poised at its edges waiting for their daily bread
and work to build its impossible structure of intricacies,
assembling its pipes from the scaffold of arpeggios
of his baroque means, setting its stops and starts,
its necessary rests and quick resumptions,
seeing in his mind’s-eye each note to come
as he’d placed them just so on paper at his desk,
simultaneously hearing them as he knew they’d resonate
against eardrums in potential cathedrals of brains
even before a key was touched,
even before a bow was raised,
even before a slender column of breath
was blown into a flute, or tympani troubled the air,
he’d hear them as he saw them, strung
along a horizontal lattice of five lines
following the lead limits of a cleft,
soaring between and around each other
darting out, in and through, climbing, diving,
making unexpected lateral runs between boundaries,
touching sometimes the edge of chaos but
never veering there, understanding the limits of all,
so that now, having prepped for his street-corner concerto,
this then unknown would descend from his scaffold and share
with the ordinary world how a tuned mind works
in harvesting song from a universe of stars,
collecting their sweet sap, distilling it into a sonic portrait
of a universe that forever lies within the looped
horizon of things.

Jim Culleny, 2/22/22