It calls the heart, this music, to a place more intimate than home, than self, that face aging in the hall mirror. This is not music to age by — no sprightly gavotte or orderly pavane, counting each beat, confining motion to the pointed feet and sagely nodding head; not Chopin, wise enough to keep some distance in his eyes between perceiver and the thing perceived. No, this is song that means to be believed, that quite believes itself, each rising wave of passionate crescendo wild and brave. The silly girl who lived inside my skin once loved this music; its melodic din was like the voice she dreamed in, sad, intense. She didn't know a thing, she had no sense; she scorned — and needed — calendar and clock, the rules, the steps, the lines, Sebastian Bach; she wanted life to break her like a tide, but not too painfully. On either side the turnpike trundles by, nurseries, farms, small towns with schools and markets in their arms, small industry, green spaces now and then. All the heart wants is to be called again.© Rhina P. Espaillat
From Where Horizons Go (Truman State University Press),
winner of the 1998 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry