Segovia

To sit on the porch at dusk, playing the rain on your guitar. The wind dancing in your courtyard - its swirling skirt, its branches rattling like castanets. The thin trickle of the sound flowing up through the house to drown in the attic's dust.

This is no time to be sad, you say. Never mind the days falling like bunches of ripe grapes. Never mind the man riding to your gate through the storm, death written in his eyes. Never mind the battered suitcases and the photographs of sepia ancestors you can no longer name.

Today you have fingered the silence intricate. Today you have given the butterflies shelter. Today you have taken the wrist of your guitar and known the leap of its pulse. Today you have tied impulse to impulse, woven beauty out of fragile air.

And the light shall never forget how you opened your doors to it. And the moon shall return to silver your palm. And the rain shall haunt your records like a scratchy ghost. And the constellations of the stars shall tremble like strings.

And music, like a young girl, will come when you call her; will thrill to your touch, will forget to be shy.