A Song In A Plaintive Minor Key Poem by Lynn W. Petty

A Song in a Plaintive Minor Key

To Catherine Spear
Upon hearing her recite her "Getting to Know You."

Gathering in a dimly-lighted coffee house,
In old Newport Beach,
Poets and, we would-be poets, assembled to hear
Guest troubadours recite their work.
We listened, and when they finished, we courteously applauded.
Despite their aspirations, they lacked glowing word-tints
Or the delicacies of pigmentation to paint their images in luxuriant colors.
The host asked Catherine if she would recite.
She stood, this daughter of Amphion, and sang her song in a plaintive minor key. This lily full in bloom, in a waste of desert sands, opened the portals of my breast, filled the hollows of my heart, like cloisonné, with golden threads of thought.
She impressed my mind with wonderful and mysterious imagery, something too beautiful to be lost.
Word by word as if brick by brick, the symbols of her words changed the architecture of our surroundings.
Lifted on the thermal of her vision, high on the dome of Hagia Sophia,
Free from the phenomena of time and space, I swam the unsounded sea
Of soul; soared the cosmos of her mind, that plumbless steep of her creative self.
Mingling her melody into the mosaic of celestial harmonies, immersed in the mist of her music, I commingled with the hierarchy of angels, and breathed the floral fragrance of heaven.
She sought her own completion by investing in another's soul the accumulated treasures of her own, and to that avail:
"The desert sands drifted down and settled at my feet."