Religious Scholar

We are All Mozart

Reflections on going through stacks of old artwork in the pantry

Simone turned from him gently, and sat beside the open window. It was dusk, and she looked out over the rooftops toward the setting sun.

“Don’t we always identify with Mozart? I am the messy one who can’t find her sketches. They are smashed between sandwich bags and sacks of barley on the kitchen shelf. They’ve been there 35 years!  Where are my songs? My stories? Why can’t I be organized and neat, with clean sheets of paper with unfolded corners stacked like Pringle’s chips in a cardboard box?

“That is not my mind. All I can do is laugh. And cry. My wig keeps slipping off, even when my back is turned. I found my best portrait: the paper split an inch from the middle, and all the edges brown. What am I always thinking of, or did for all those years? Everything once fine smells like old newspapers forgotten in the cellar, a bit dusty, a bit damp. That is the stale smell of my soul.

“So, did you know I can write backwards and sometimes draw what’s over my shoulder while looking in the mirror? That once I wrote all night and drew all day, magic flying out of me like a sparkler’s fire? Find me someone, quick, before the sun is gone, someone with the Dewey decimal system etched into his heart, a fierce art-saving Kali: a feather-duster in one hand, a Vupoint scanning wand in the other. Have him save these fragments of my soul before they wither into scraps of random words and lines, a corner of a dancing image, a leaf, the last iambic memory of a lost quatrain.

“We are all Mozart, leaving life with nothing to our name but that trail of vague flickering fairy lights—a poem, a song, a star. Save them, they are all I am. If one of them must, then let it be me, who turns to dust."

Blocks of white snow linger

under an early spring sky.

Aha! They stretch their wings

and off they fly!

Hearing seven-year

Cicadas, we knew next time

I'd listen alone.

Fiery young poetry

Sizzles like a flaming dish

Brought quickly to the table.

It is only after flames collapse

In a lingering glow—

A dark haunting of fire—

That we accept a portion,

Let it cool slightly on our plates,

Savor the aroma’s ascent,

Take its warm body into our own.

                            --Linda Brown Holt

White Deer

Approaching the woods, I met a man.

“You have a camera in your hand,”

He said, “If you are lucky, you will catch

An albino deer where the two paths branch.

I shot it with my cell phone cam,”

He called as I went past, his dog’s long

Leash was dragging in the sand.

White deer, white deer,

In these familiar woods,

Woods full of brown fawns,

Squirrels and chipmunks,

By Martin Lake where once I

Spotted nine blue herons in a row.

But never did I see nor hear

White deer, white deer.

My eyes grew marksman-sharp,

Ears twitched at every creaking twig,

I softly jogged the catwalk planks

To where the paths take separate banks,

Meandering through the trees.

A cardinal’s scarlet caught my eye,

A redcap’s knocking stirred my ear

And in the middle of a grove, a black

Cat licked its paw, but no

White deer.

I never saw the wood so vividly, so bright;

Each branch and breaking bough

Etched on my sight.  My steps grew quick,

My lungs gasped at a fevered pitch,

Eyes darted side to side, and

For a moment, outside time,

I felt the quiver of the wilderness:

For a moment, outside thought,

I had become the thing I sought.

The rain came gentle first,

And then the clouds moved overhead.

I shuddered, and had reached the forest

Edge again.  There was no further thing

To see, to find; the deer had vanished,

Never to be mine.

And so I headed back, but wiser, clear:

For in a sense, I’d seen—or been—

White deer, white deer.

                                     --Linda Brown Holt    copyright 2010