The woman with her mouth
shaped in a perfect “O”
I imagine she sings opera
or is in a fine classical chorus.
I see Ellen in her
Zoom’s square living room,
the daughter of an old friend’s friend
from Berkeley. The conductor is in
his home country of Sweden.
It is eleven A.M..in San Francisco.
It is night in Sweden,
but I can see through his window pine trees
and it is still light out.
From eleven to twelve,
I do not check virus numbers
or watch the news.
In our hundreds of soundless little spaces,
The harmony, unheard, is perfect.
Reprinted with kind permission from the upcoming anthology Pandemic Puzzle Poems, to be published by Blue Light Press, San Francisco. You can read more poetry by Alice Rogoff, and more poems about music, in Fog and Light, also from Blue Light Press.
Our April “Singing Saturdays” featuring Verdi Requiem starts April 10.