I cannot give you back the song
A sonnet on the fleeting nature of beautiful experiences
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Another poet in my writing group shared a line a few months ago that stuck with me: “No one can give you back the wind.” The sonnet below is a riff on that image, and a longer reflection on the experiential moments of beauty that feel all the more precious because they are so fleeting.
A physical object has staying power and can last years, if not forever. But many experiences of the natural world and of our most meaningful interpersonal connections, are gone almost as quickly as they occur. Their “loss” is inevitable, like time passing, yet traces of them remain as memory in our somatic nervous system.
One might even propose that what makes them beautiful is their time-bound nature, whether the cycles of the moon, the flow of the ocean tides, or the ongoing process of growth and change within us. And perhaps they are not completely gone at all, since we can call them back from time to time, and reassemble them with the magic of imagination.
I cannot give you back the song
I cannot give you back the song. It’s gone:
that night you slid the napkin from my lap
and danced us through the tables in the back.
The bassist hit the strings. The crowd moved on.
Neither can I give you back the breeze.
It licked our skin and flicked our wild hair.
We sailed through islands floating in the air,
curled tight below and woke to redwood trees.
I cannot give you anything so grand
as orange moons that hold us in their eyes.
The beach was full of dreams, the clouds of skies.
Turquoise waves unrolled into the sand.
When hands of clocks recoil in their sleep.
the sedimented loss in you will keep.
This poem is so fabululous in how it conjures up quirky moments and movements that are universal and memorable! Brava!!