Güd wrtr

Make some noise, on the beat,
when the notes leap off the page
and command, now! — you do —

You whack that bass drum with the soft mallet,
feel the heartbeat reverberate through
your hand. You make the huge, overgrown
cymbal of a tam whoooooonnng with
percussive emphasis, an exclamation point
that envelops the room, while next to you
the snare’s rat-a-tat establishes a rhythm
that cannot be ignored, a satisfying
counterpoint to the high clear bells
and the plinky xylophone.

You hear the brrrrrrrp! of a thumbed tambourine,
the whap! of a slapstick, the ching-ching-ching
of sleighbells. You take your turn at the resonant
marimba, the crystalline vibraphone.
And you confront the long, slender silver
chimes, taking up a felted hammer in each
hand to whack the rimmed edges on cue.

But it’s the fat, round notes of the tympani
that embed themselves in the soles
of the feet, this heartbeat, this backbone
of the band, breathing in time with those
blowing horns, making music with mallets
or sticks in hand — if not perfect —
well played, my percussion friends,
so well played.

•••

Above: From the percussion section, Dr. Molly Redfield,
director of the FLC Symphonic Wind Ensemble /
Photo: Jan Haag

•••

You can watch part of the Folsom Lake College Symphonic
Wind Ensemble percussion section in action here playing
a peak moment of “Into the Storm,” which will be played at the
Dec. 8 concert at the Harris Center at Folsom Lake College.

Birds do it themselves,
winging from warm-weather locales
over winter to cooler summer spots.

So do toads, migrating from log piles
or burrows in the cold months
to travel en masse to the ponds

where they were born, tadpoling
into toadlets before blossoming
into their full toady selves.

But my plants, which somewhere
along their evolutionary path
lost their feet, dropped their wings,

need my hands. So at the last
possible moment, before big rains
whoosh in, I migrate some

from backyard deck to front porch,
other tender ones to inside the house.
Nobody’s happy, including me,

who feels a bit mooshed with all
this greenery that requires more
careful watering than the hose-on-deck

method. And I realize during this
biannual migration of outdoors to in,
indoors to out, that I inherited

a good number of these guys, that
they once belonged to other people’s
dead loved ones. My mother,

a forgetful plant owner, had
none to leave me, which was fine
since I brought far too much

of her stuff home. But
I smile as I move Benjamina,
the variegated ficus that belonged

to Dick’s mom who died in 1999,
and I’ve repotted a couple of times
(the plant, not Mom).

And I have Mrs. Lester’s peace lilies,
a couple of which also needed
repotting after the racoons

living under my deck decided
to sample and fortunately reject
them. Now I have Mrs. Morgan’s

anthuriums, which arrived looking
wan, no doubt missing her,
and I am happy to report that

they have perked up nicely
after summering on the deck.
Some sun, some water does

wonders for us all. “We’ll be
back out in it before we know it,”
I tell them, hoping that

they believe me.

She sprawls now, unrecognizable
from her tiny, tender self I put in place
five months ago,

flailing her many arms like a Hindu
goddess, her bunches of green-globed
breasts still intent on ripening

in November. She is not giving up.
Part of me knows that I must pull
her out, but not yet, not yet.

Like the play as it nears its end,
the dagger in her hand, I beg, every time,
not yet, not yet.

Though many humans could
point to a sword, how many
could identify a plowshare?

Any farmer could, any soul who
has tilled massive amounts of soil
over acreage meant to grow

food for thousands. I could not,
having to look it up. But when
I stumbled upon the sculpture

carved into near life by a Soviet
artist set into stone at the United
Nations the year after I was born,

I recognized the bending sword
being remade into the business end
of a plow, meant to slice grass

and earth, not flesh, inverting
the soil, preparing it for planting.
A Biblical dream, one that so many

dream, even those, by choice or not,
defending their homelands across
the globe. We know them—

or knew them—fathers, mothers,
brothers, sisters in arms, in service,
to whom we are grateful,

who might wish the same thing:
to make plowshares of their swords,
to have no need for them,

to learn war no more.

When you as a child learned to speak,
It’s not that you didn’t know words—

It’s that, from the centuries, you knew so many,
And it’s hard to choose the words that will be your own.

—Alberto Rios, from “A House Called Tomorrow”

•••

This, then, is the challenge,
sorting through a long-acquired vocabulary

of word leaves, seemingly millions,
some tiny and greening, new-to-us words,

some thriving and hearty, leaves big as
bread plates, vein-threaded as a human heart,

and many, many brittle and fallen,
crunchy and stepped on, gone.

It’s the gone I fret over, the ones
that leave before I want them to.

The unkind words shouted in anger,
the frosty words of aftermath—

those I’m happy to see fall, the unwanted
detritus, happy to rake them into big piles

and plop them in the big green bin to be
carted away. But that word there, the one

nowhere near the tip of my tongue,
likely lingering near my spleen, the one

I can’t bring to my lips or to the page
when I want it—those are the ones

I worry about, the ones I mourn. When
did these words leave? Might they return?

And if they don’t, do I have enough for
the rest of this existence to see me through,

to speak, to snatch as they drift by
and set them lightly down on a page

like this one right here?

We say to each other when we call
once we’ve motored to our respective

homes, unlocked our sticky locks
and ushered ourselves back in.

We call, minutes or sometimes hours
after we arrive, having forgotten to,

assuming that the other instinctively
knows that we are safely

home, that their love has tagged
along after us like a loyal dog,

that it couldn’t do anything but
keep us safe, embraced from afar.

Because it always does.
I pray that it always will.

Right there, above the big crack
on the edge of the curb,

bracketed by two fallen leaflets from
a crimson Chinese pistache tree,

there it is: Love on the sidewalk.
The inquisitive part of me wonders

who inscribed it and why. How long
has it sent this arms-wide-open

message on the corner of Pala and 50th
to any and all passers- and drivers-by?

Probably goes unseen by most walkers
like the ones this afternoon hanging

onto the ends of leashes, but most likely
sniffed by many dogs, who, even if

they can’t read it, certainly know love
when they smell it.

The green it has grown
over the last nine months

is being overtaken by the coming
crimson, signaling the inevitable fall.

And though the nights are now chillier,
I stand beneath this sun-streaked tree

half hoping the chill and wet never arrive,
that we might live in this in-between,

not-too-hot, not-too-cold, perpetual
Goldilocks state of just right.

Which is where I am temporarily rooted,
reminding myself to tuck this moment

into my storehouse of memory for later,
when, like squirrels unearthing peanuts

they have tucked into the soil of my backyard,
I will reach into my pocket and find it,

delighted by the warmth of the forgotten.

Who baked into me the notion
that I must know the name
of a thing to know the thing?

Sure, the specificity of “oriole”
over “bird,” or “catalpa” over “tree”
provides a better visual,

not to mention a sound. It must
have been thanks to my mother
who sent me to the shelf

in the living room where the
creamy World Book encyclopedias
lived, with a resounding,

“Look it up!” whether a word
in the dictionary or a fact about,
say, American history.

I was barely in double digits when
I realized how much our reference
library lacked, not meeting

an atlas until high school. What I
would have given for a substantial
thesaurus, instead of my mother’s

yellowing paperback Roget’s.
And yes, after years of phoning
librarians to fact check all manner

of facts, the miracle of typing a query
into a search engine with a choice
of sources fanned out like a deck of cards

changes everything. But now, on walks,
I try to resist the urge to pull the device
from my pocket to look up the name

of a flower or confirm what year
Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.
The challenge: to sometimes simply be

without knowing, without categorizing,
do more dreaming, not planning.
What matters is pausing to peer

at a still-brilliant whatchamacallit
grinning over a low picket fence
in early November, or beholding

the colors in leaf mélange carpeting
a sidewalk, not to interview it
but simply admire it,

not insist that it tell me its name.

It can happen this way:
one day gray and dreary,
the rose pocked with droplets,

the next, brightening under fresh
sun, with winged visitors alighting
for a sniff or a snuggle.

All of this on the edge of winter,
fall working its way into foliage,
as it does. But bee. But bug.

But rose. Look at her blooming
brilliance, clearly, thankfully,
not done yet.