by Laura K Secor

Music Lessons

Sometimes, in the middle of the lesson,
we exchanged places. She would gaze a moment at her hands
spread over the keys; then the small house with its knick-knacks,
its shut windows,

its photographs of her sons and the serious husband,
vanished as new shapes formed. Sound 
became music, and music a white
scarp for the listener to climb

alone. I leaped rock over rock to the top
and found myself waiting, transformed,
and still she played, her eyes luminous and willful
her pinned hair falling down —

forgetting me, the house, the neat green yard,
she fled in that lick of flame all tedious bonds:
supper, the duties of flesh and home,
the knife at the throat, the death in the metronome.

— Mary Oliver, Twelve Moons

Allegro

After a black day, I play Haydn,
and feel a little warmth in my hands.

The keys are ready. Kind hammers fall,
The sound is spirited, green, and full of silence.

The sound says that freedom exists
and someone pays no taxes to Caesar.

I shove my hands in my haydnpockets
and act like a man who is calm about it all.

I raise my haydnflag. The signal is:
“We do not surrender. But want peace.

The music is a house of glass standing on a slope;
rocks are flying, rocks are rolling.

The rocks roll straight through the house
but every pane of glass is still whole.

— Tomas Transtromer, The Half-Finished Heaven, translated by Robert Bly

I play music.  Not the piano, as Mary Oliver’s music teacher and Tomas Transtromer play, but the harp.  I am squeezing harp practice in between all the many obligations of a busy life, and I’m not fluent the way Mary’s teacher and Tomas are fluent.  But the poems remind me why I play.  They both talk about creation as freedom.  She writes, “she fled in that lick of flame all tedious bonds” and he writes, “The sound says that freedom exists.”  The music grants freedom to the performer and the listener, in an alchemy matched only by the other arts.  

Most of our days are the duties of flesh and home, but spirit offers us, not time off for good behavior, but a lifting of the heart into the sky, as a reward for an act of imagination.  The act of imagination can be the singing of a song, or applying watercolors to paper.  It can be dance, it can be the telling of a story.  It occurred to me that our imaginations are our keys to unlocking our hearts.  It is so easy to consume modern media, and believe that we are living our lives.  But to be awake is an act of imagination.  We have to pull our eyes from our screens, and breath deep the smell of our gardens in the rain, or supper cooking on the stove.  We can knit our lives back together with crochet hooks.  We can toss a football in the back yard.  We can get on our bikes and go, go, go.  

What are your choices for claiming freedom?