death could come!

The musician's finger do not hurry at all as they climb up the Jacob's Ladder of her bass.   They are not accomplishing tasks laid down by others, but have agreed to luminous labors suggested - by whom?  The fingers go higher. The Cantata says: "Death is not far off... Death could come!"  Men's and women's voices all around cry out:  "It is the ancient law!"

Now we sense the odor of roots, of partridge berries, masses of leaves that give up their lives without complaining.

The musician's fingers appear from the house of the hand-back, as if the hand were a being in itself, with its own slow joys, and its own cottage where it lives, sleeping long on winter nights.

Now the beings run up the mountain path; they are goats that do a firm dance, one foot down, then the other, many fields and mountain paths with goats on them leaping...And we who listen, are crossing a mountain at dusk. We walk a long time through the moor in the dark, at last we see a hut with one lamp lit...

~ Robert Bly

from Reaching Out to the World

(For Susan Mathews Allard and Her Double Bass)

art by picasso