Music for a Small Lake

Station trombones around your lake
and listen to them talk to each other.
Picture this as early morning, the sun
just over the horizon, mellow as the brass
bells of the horns. Add a scattered choir
of family voices, arms reaching out
from Brigadoon mists like musicians
pumping theirs - up and down - voices gliding
in and out of tune with a trombone slide.

Let those now gone hum in the background
from across the cove. Get parents,
sisters and brothers to sing their
advice in rounds, drowning out each other's
words. Enter a sailboat with spouse and children
and glide to the center of the sound. Childish tongues

will trip light as sound waves reverberating
from wings of blue herons overhead. Notes will wash
over you in a barcarolle so lovely that time
cannot tell you it will never last. Snatches of all
conversations you've ever had on these waters build to a
  crescendo
where you are the center point of those positioned
  trombones.
Stay there as long as possible, rocked in the pure
joy of sound and movement, until time,
like an underlying drumbeat of a distant
yet present thunder measures its coming storm
and the last trombone fades into the distance.

- Marilyn M. Mann, Copyright December 1994