3/8/06 Culver City, CA

Music heard so deeply

That it is not heard at all, but you are the music

While the music lasts.

-----T.S. Elliot, “The Dry Salvages”

We come in ones and twos this night

A gentle crescendo of persons

More and more to the fold

An incremental chemistry of gathering

Of a slowly burgeoning critical mass

In the living room

Of one house on a planet

Spattered with blood

A world

Needing no other hell

Yet here In placid but joyous fire

This rollicking effluvium of harmonies

And somber canticles

We are inured to time

The irradiated air of this room

Now for a while the very contents of eternity

Our small magnificent rite,

Conjoined in the agape of mutual voice

Transcendent and as one in the mettle of love so mustered.

We band of brothers and sisters here

In our slender compact against death

This, our beachhead of song.