Deep Notes, Quick Pace

by L.M. Browning

Excerpt from Fleeting Moments of Fierce Clarity: Journal of a New England Poet

Deep Notes, Quick Pace is one of those poems I am tempted to let the reader interpret without a relating-point. The emotions that triggered the creation of this poem are so full they cannot be wholly captured in words.

The poem began to gather one evening while I was alone listening to a piece of modern orchestral music. Alone, working long-past late night and into early morning, this piece of music came over my headphones. I ceased tinkering with the document I was working on, opened a note pad and let the words taking form.

The Music was so radiant—so intense, I found myself transcended. I was taken away from this flat earth and into a place of suspended bliss and acute awareness of the miracle of drawing a single breath. Riding a wave of poetic ecstasy, I savored the moment. Yet as my appreciation for the moment ascended within me, I found the joy slowly muting into grief.

This poem embodies a fleeting moment of fierce clarity as it captures one of those brief, transcendent moments of pure love and appreciation that when experienced, affirm to us that the struggles in our daily life are worth persevering through.

The poem is an expression of the ache we feel when the music heard is so beautiful yet also bound to fade into silence as it evidently approaches its end. …Those delicate moments of radiance, when the moment is so precious and the soul next to us so dear that we hold tight—willing the moment to last, knowing that it will fade.

These moments are so beautiful that we mourn them, even as we live them.

…We are in this life for such a brief time—

a thin space of a breath and that it is all gone.

—Connecticut, January 2012

Deep Notes, Quick Pace

by L.M. Browning

The despairing beauty of the music

causes us to lament life as we live it.

The capture and loss of the moment

—the bittersweet quality of these fleeting days—

deepen the significance of what is felt.

The fragility of time

—strong one moment,

fading the next—

is the seduction

of the human experience.

The momentary ripeness of this flesh,

the short space of this breath,

quickly withered,

the beauty is missed

if not lived.

Each note

sweet and somber

has its harmony.

This movement

rushes so quickly

unto silence.

Fall backward

into the tide.

Be carried away.