Music for Guitar and Stone

In music I can love the small failures, 
the ones which show how difficult it is:
the young guitarist's fingers slipping, 
for an instant, from their climb of chords.
He sits alone on the stage, bright light, 
one leg wedged up on a step, his raised knee 
round and tender, and the notes like birds 
from a vanishing flock, each one more exquisite and lonely; 
the fingers part of the hand, yet separate from the hand, 
each living muscle married to the whole. 
In life the failures feel like they'll kill me, 
or you will, or we'll kill each other; 
it's so hard to feel the music 
moving through us, the larger patterns 
of river and mountain, where damage is not separate 
from creation, transformation; 
where every mistake we make can wash 
smooth and clean as stones in water, 
then land on shore, then be thrown in again.
I want to sleep, like a stone, for a thousand years. 
I want to wake with creatures traced smooth on my skin.
I want to forget I loved you and failed you 
as you failed and loved me too, in the lengthy, painful 
evolution of our kind; I want to sleep 
for a thousand years, then wake up in some other world
where failure is part of the music, and seen 
to make it more beautiful; where the fingers 
forgive each other; where we can sit naked again 
at the window, watch the notes fly by like birds
who have finally found their way home.


Ruth Schwartz