Still in the Orchestra

There’s not much left of the song
but I tilt my head and listen
greedy for what’s left
the last notes slip by like the final drops
in an upturned glass.

Poetry, always looking backward
has been my music
but emotion recalled in tranquility
is a past happiness
like a warm breeze it
leaves little trace.

There was faith,
the dull stubborn kind; mostly
a rejection of each day’s truth
along the way I lost that song
but nothing has really changed
since I mislaid it.

I’m still trying to hear
the liquid lilt of the inaudible
still paging through old scores
to avoid the danger of imagining
some new arrangement.

But there’s so much music waiting
and so little time.