In Lori Powell’s “Sonata in D Major (J.S. Bach),” we become one with a piece of music as it merges into a room, a life and a litany of daily pleasures. I love this poem’s associative slip between objects and ideas, and how exquisitely it lingers in the simplest of beauties.

Powell is a relatively new Mainer living in Bath, where she teaches English to immigrants and refugees, and works on poems and other writing when she can. She is someone who needs the long pull of beach and tide and winter.

 

Sonata in D Major (J.S. Bach)

By Lori Powell

 

Unnatural to sit still in the midst of such motion.

It might be a life, yours

or another’s, lived

at break-neck pace.

It might be a cluttered room,

an owl patrolling a wood, the recipe for a cake,

the cake itself. Or just the love

of these, a great love

navigating your body, shaping

ear to note, note to ear,

 

finally becoming domestic as it bustles

the length of the gut,

 

turning your thoughts

to errands that need doing

and milk, lovely milk, running low in its container.

 

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Sonata in D Major (J.S. Bach)” copyright © 2019 by Lori Powell. It appears by permission of the author.

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