The Grove

By Ford, Frank Bernard

Those leaning pines with sparse and floating branches,
the sea behind thinned here and there by light:
A Japanese print before I'd seen one.

Does the scene exist before the artist makes it so?
He makes another and he makes it too.
As I do once again listening to music.

I don't think such nonsense at 20 at that sea-brushed
Imperial Navy Hotel as then the giggling maids clean up
after Americans. I know they giggle more at us
than they ever did at them, the cultural differences -
the way we laugh at signs like NOT TO BE SAFETY OF SWIMM.

I can't put Galway out of that young place
woven like the fragrances off sand and pine
through notes running from my record here, his
flute clean-cut along the trees and sea and funny signs.

                                                Weaving
in and out of time.
Folk melodies from turn-of-century Japan he plays
and I sense that scattered grove a century before
hotels and such, a farmer hums a tune from his own life
        and that is history.

The wind in from the sea is not benign.

But one day it is again and the painter
sets his easel up. He has had his coffee
and needs nothing
more today than the trying to make art
the way and not the way the wind is music
the way and not the way the light informs.

Whatever we find out there is there for us and despite us
and despite the heartbreak years.

Tell the composer at Auschwitz, the dancer at Hiroshima,
                                all
your fine ideas.