A Response to "The next life" by Orchestra Sekra

Sax like a trail of seafoam as the voice murmurs, clearer less clear, between realities...

The voice, almost inaudible at times, murmuring, just under the waves, rises up and pulls back, almost taking me to what is between worlds. The words murmur all around me. They become distinct, then disappear into the sweetness of the sax, a sax become like a deep calling home. This morning I read a poem, 'Talking to Ourselves,' to which Orchestra Sekra's 'The next life' seems a perfect accompaniment, and as I read and listened, yes, our thoughts are often in that place between worlds, following our loved ones into the ocean wake, waking on the shore, with and without them, carrying on with our lives:


Talking to Ourselves

by Philip Schultz

A woman in my doctor's office last week
couldn't stop talking about Niagara Falls,
the difference between dog and deer ticks,
how her oldest boy, killed in Iraq, would lie
with her at night in the summer grass, singing
Puccini. Her eyes looked at me but saw only
the saffron swirls of the quivering heavens.

Yesterday, Mr. Miller, our tidy neighbor,
stopped under our lopsided maple to explain
how his wife of sixty years died last month
of Alzheimer's. I stood there, listening to
his longing reach across the darkness with
each bruised breath of his eloquent singing.

This morning my five-year-old asked himself
why he'd come into the kitchen. I understood
he was thinking out loud, personifying himself,
but the intimacy of his small voice was surprising.

When my father's vending business was failing,
he'd talk to himself while driving, his lips
silently moving, his black eyes deliquescent.
He didn't care that I was there, listening,
what he was saying was too important.

"Too important," I hear myself saying
in the kitchen, putting the dishes away,
and my wife looks up from her reading
and asks, "What's that you said?"

"Talking to Ourselves" by Philip Schultz, from Failure. © Harcourt, 2007. Reprinted with permission.

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with thanks to Balthaz for recommending this single

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