The Key Poem by Daniel Brick

I paused twenty minutes into my walk
around Lake Como on a late autumn day.
I opened the kleenix package, and
a bright silver key dropped on the walkway.
The p-i-n-g of silver against concrete
was a musical sound, brief but bright
and pure. What made that a sound of music?
Was it the key, the concrete, my imagination,
or was it a harmony of all three factors?
And the key itself - how did it come to be
stuffed in a collection? Was it chance or design?

I was standing beside and beneath one
of the cottonwoods in which pairs of eagles
sometimes perch, perhaps more often than
we witness. People like me stop and stare
intently on that highest branch, on which
they brood, without a sound or gesture.
Are they as stunned as we are? But no eagle
perching or flying distracted my thoughts.
How does such a small event as the dropped key
loom so large in my mind that it displaces
eagles and its sound equals a melody by Mahler?

This setting is a promenade around the lake
on a leisurely Sunday afternoon on a warm
autumn day. Perhaps it deserves music by Ravel
in his andante disposition to accompany the walkers.
Suddenly, four young women, all of them pushing
a baby carriage, sweep past me in a flurry of talk
about graduation, first nursing job, boyfriends,
all this compressed in the time it takes them
to rush past me and disappear over a small hill.
These are confident, successful, untroubled
young adults, firmly grasping their present duties
and future possibilities, needing no magical intervention.

Oh, how their frivolity belied the genuine reality
of the moment as I saw it. How their future-driven
lives surpassed the four people in their care,
four retarded adults, whose crushed minds confined
them to baby carriages. Perhaps my key will unlock
whatever confines them body and soul and leaves them
unfree in a world of increasing freedoms. And they
may join the frivolity of youth instead premature
dotage. Is this a worthy use of whatever magic
imbues my key, if magic there can be in such
common place things we stumble upon in the sight of eagles.