like a kite on air: Jane Spiro (poem)

Another poem from the new Confluence anthology from the Two Rivers group of poets that I lead down here in Devon. 

I have known Jane Spiro, and her poet husband John Daniel, for a very long time. When I think of Jane, I think of amber – this is an important motif in Jane's novel Nothing I Touch Stands Still, and it seems to me also that Baltic amber conjures the 'essence of Jane': warm and warming, deep, slightly mysterious and with transformative powers.

Jane works with aspects of language and learning at Oxford Brookes, although she lives in Totnes; and she also has an international reputation with regard to her work – emails from her come from Hungary, Mexico and etc. She and John host Weir Poets.

It's superfluous to say that Jane is also a musician...

Violin Valentine

I knew from the first moment

we would find a voice, a way to sing,

you just wood and string

without me, and I a reaching

in space, a breath between notes

without you.

 I knew how the singing

would be, like a kite on air,

a running like a wild child

into sea. 

I wonder now about the mystery

in your wood, if you mourn the forest

where you were, if the wine-brown memory

in your grain holds all the singing

we have done,  all the ways we have

reached for new notes,

all the ways we have found our place.

– Jane Spiro