Dissonance Royal Traveller Poem by Barbara Guest

sound opens sound


shank of globe strings floating out


something like images are here

opening up avenues to view a dome


a distant clang reaches the edifice.

understanding what it means
to understand music

cloudless movement beyond the neck's reach

an hypnotic lull in porcelain water break mimics

tonality crunch of salad under waddling

a small seizure
from monumentality

does not come or go with understanding


the path will end

birdhouse of trembling cotton


or dream expelled it

parcel on the landlocked moor.

explaining music

and their clothes entangled

who walk into a puddle of minnows;

minnows in a bowl

consonant with water.

the drifted footpad


ambushed by reeds signals the listening

oars.

music disappears into oars.

in the middle the world is brown;

on the opposite side of the earth

an aroma of scarlet.


this accompanies our hearing music;

the sleeve of heaven

and the hoof of earth

loosed from their garrison.


dissonance may abandon miserere

on bruised knee hasten to the idol.

and what is consonance—the recluse—


entering and exiting

as often as a monarch butterfly

touches a season;


by accident grips the burning flowers.


in the stops between terror

the moon aflame on its plaza.

autumn of rippling wind

and the noise of baskets

smell of tin fists.


and harsh fists

on the waterfall changing the season;

the horse romps in flax

a cardboard feature

creating a cycle of flax.


music imagines this cardboard


horse in cardboard jacket

flagrant the ragged grove


red summit red.


dissonance royal traveller


altered the red saddle.