Poem by Jim Culleny

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. He’d
set to work assembling its pipes from a scaffold of
arpeggios by his baroque means, setting its starts and stops,
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 they would 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 drum skins troubled the air,
he’d hear them as he saw them, strung out 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, 10/3/22