“Singing at the End” by Molly Scott
How do we know when that is – the end?
so we can put our boots on,
so we can be sure our doors are open
and all the chores are done,
so we can feel the breath, the precious breath
move through the bone house one more time
ribboned with song.
When the sound is right, the singer knows.
It’s muscles, really, and intent,
an exercise of tensing this, releasing that,
a gesture – as a dancer arcs her arm across the air
extending energy that cuts the space
to resonance, so calibrated, so precise,
it twists the heart a notch
and we are rearranged forever.
Something explodes in mind when idea
meets itself beyond the bound of reason
There are these intervals that ring like bells
in layers, through the world we know
and ripple into ones we don’t,
fluid along a line, as sound strung on the breath,
so serpentine, so muscular, one has to open up
in awe of it and just let go.
So, at the end, is this how it will be?
Self, solid as a flexing flute, filled through a life
with little overtures, chansons,
shattering to shards of colored glass
as layers in the lungs fall open,
the final curtain parts,
and full voiced God
pours through
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Molly Scott’s Artist Statement: Throughout a colorful life ranging from theater, television, concert performance and recording, to mothering, social justice work, psychology, teaching and travel, I have drawn deepest meaning and creative juice as a writer from the inter-web of music, language and the natural world. I grew
up on a clear lake and the Deep Green of that under-water realm lies just beneath the skin of my present experience as an “older” woman. Along the way, I’ve garnered advance degrees, taught internationally, made recordings, formulated therapeutic voice work called Creative Resonance, published Up to the Windy Gate: Poems of Grief and Grace, and won the Robert Frost Foundation Poetry prize. I’m writing fulltime now, living with animals in a wooden house at the end of a dirt road, doing the best I can to respond to this cherished, terrifying, infinitely precious world with pen, voice, and tuned intention– every day.
