The Grove

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.