Martin Elster

The Silver of the Stars

We all look at a focal point in motion,
a stick moved by an arm moved by a brain.
We all have ears that listen to the rain
of timbres bouncing off the walls. What notion
had moved a mind to think of such a song,
where flutes echo the silver of the stars,
where oboes, cellos, clarinets, guitars
evoke the forest maples, where a gong
conjures up the Bronze Age? We rehearse —
a group of instruments as differing
as all the suns that make the universe.
Yet as our metals, woods, and drumheads sing,
they link us to the tremolos and trills
that once lulled us in the valleys and the hills.

Across the Stone

As the land was slipping, her fingers gripping
    The hypothermic air,
She felt like a worn quartz pebble borne
    Straight down the scarp to stare

Into the sun, which soon was done
    With comforting the Peak.
Tree limbs were white as bat bones. Night
    Had come. The tors were bleak.

Then slow as trilobites, as sly
    As wind erodes a summit,
Light brushed the land like a gentle hand,
    And soon began to strum it.

She walks alone across the stone.
    Below her slopes the scree,
And farther still, beneath this hill,
    Dove Valley’s fertile sea,

Where cattle graze and feel the rays
    And limestone underneath,
While stoneflies swirl, green ferns uncurl,
    And hare bound through the heath.

She walks across the fields and moss
    Of the White Peak and the Dark,
Where ashwood, pine, bright celandine,  
    The wagtail, and the lark

All know she’s here. This rocky sphere
    Has flown again through space
To warm the shale, gritstone, and dale,
    Put color in the face

Of the plateau, dissolve the snow,
    And stir this rough terrain, 
Where now she walks across the rocks
    With a calm she can’t explain.