Untitled ("It is with and without music")

A spare porch poem where animal alertness, loneliness, and spiritual listening all meet in one uneasy domestic stillness.

A porch poem of unease in which a worried dog will not leave the front porch nor settle 'inside / the front door,' the house has 'not a stoop... / Just wooden lifts / And lonelyness,' and both dog and speaker sense 'YA' can not hunt / When there is / something wrong / with the way / the bells ring.' It closes with the speaker searching 'for a voice' and naming herself 'the saint / in the revirbation.'

Despite the title 'It is with and without music' (a refrain shared with another piece in the sequence), the body is mostly about a wrongness in sound. The dog's divided posture - neither out nor in, stuck on the threshold - externalizes the speaker's own suspended dread, and the bare architecture ('not a stoop here / Just wooden lifts / And lonelyness') makes loneliness a structural feature of the house, as built-in as the steps. The shared animal knowledge is the poem's hinge: 'Our dog knows / as well as I' that 'YA' can not hunt' when 'the bells ring' wrong - hunting, the local measure of normal life, is suspended by an ominous mis-tuning in the soundscape, bells that should reassure but do not. The ending turns the listener into a seeker and a holy figure: 'I search for a voice' and become 'the saint / in the revirbation,' sanctity found not in clear sound but in reverberation, the lingering, uncertain echo. To be the saint of the reverb is to dwell in aftersound and ambiguity, which is exactly the poem's condition - waiting, alert, between the bell and its dying ring. The spellings ('lonelyness,' the contracted 'YA' for you, and 'revirbation') are the source's and I have preserved them.