TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

Every place has its own music. The beach, the city block, the woods. In the suburbs, the summertime symphony is birdsong, cicadas, car engines, lawnmowers, and kids playing and laughing outside. In the winter, it’s tires on the wet, slushy street and snow shovels scraping the asphalt, but the birdsong and sounds of the kids playing remain.

For a few years, a father and his teenage daughter lived across the street from us, and the daughter played the trumpet. I only knew this because I heard her practicing almost daily, the notes rising from their screened-in porch and reaching my office windows. I pictured the notes like balloons floating over the traffic from one side of the street to the other.

Sometimes, when I walk my dog to the next block, I pass the house where a woman gives piano lessons. Through the open windows I hear kids practicing their scales or trying a simple song, starting again when they make a mistake. The sound of perseverance is beautiful! It always makes me smile.

There is music everywhere — played from the stereos of passing cars, sung by unselfconscious walkers wearing headphones. There’s the slamming of screen doors. The barking dogs. The occasional siren. And those noises are a kind of music, too.

The title of today’s poem, “Panis Angelicus,” is Latin for "Bread of Angels" or "Angelic Bread” – and it’s also the title of a famous hymn. The poem finds the sacred all around.

Panis Angelicus
by Carol Muske-Dukes

Here, I say, here’s a little step
we call the bop, two up and two back

and Rosalina gets it right the first time. 
Then there’s the hustle, if you like traffic.
I like the flute heard every morning in 
the courtyard. I like the tinny transmission

from Puccini’s formal soul to the portable
Aldo carries. I like the two signorinas who sing
for nothing each night, arm in arm, crossing the piazza.
The heart shunts out its lifetime supply

along lines as precise and irrelevant as the old
map of a town nearby, bombed in the war, rebuilt
in modern style, not a sign of the old streets.
Not a sign of the portals, the blessed mask above. 

Heaven, in the frescoes, has such an air
of distraction, all those souls intent 
on their vanishing difference. Even in 
the afterworld’s imperial gaze, a woman

retraces the shape of her child’s head,
over and over, with her imagined hands. 
Maybe the body makes the soul regret
its perfectibility:

                                        See how the old nun,
like a half-blind angel, follows the stream
of children from the village church? She is
guarding each pair of closed eyes, each mouth

closed over a bridling tongue on which
a sphere of flat dough, the host,
uneasily rests. 

                     Then there is the other morning.
Bells. Rosalina on a skateboard. The skate’s lame,
but it carries her so far, she says. Nearly
to the old fortification, far as the eye can follow.

"Panis Angelicus" by Carol Muske-Dukes from WYNDMERE © 1985 Carol Muske-Dukes. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.