The Saw Lady and the Sound of Music
The Saw Lady and
the Sound of Music/Alex Cigale
For Natalia Paruz
How a piece of steel
can sound so human
The wooden handle
goes between the legs
The serrated side
dangerously close
The bow runs along
over the steel edge
Ever so slowly
bending its body
The greater the bend
the higher the note
Who I am and why
I was put on this earth
Hand-blown Crystal bowls
mounted on a spindle
The turning edges
touched with wet fingers
Crystal changing shape
vibrates at volume
The sound fills the room
everywhere and nowhere
One of Benjamin
Franklin’s inventions
Mesmer used it to
relax his patients
The reason we listen
with wonder and awe
Three to four to five
Pythagoras explained
Same ratio as the
harmonic spectrum
All science is combined in this moment
That music works through
sinus and cosinus
Fortissimos, tremolos, lamentosos
Teach me how to play
the bicycle pump
Note: The half-lines of the poem are “hinged” or “jointed”; they are called “hard caesura” in Anglo-Saxon poetry.
About the poet: Alex Cigale edits SYN/AES/THE/TIC, a literary magazine based on the aesthetics of Found Art. His poems have recently appeared in The Cafe, Colorado, Global City, Green Mountains and North American reviews, Drunken Boat, Hanging Loose, McSweeney’s, and Zoland Poetry. Other work can be found online at The Adirondack Review, Babel Fruit, Big Bridge, The Externalist, nthposition, The Potomac Journal, Quarter After Eight, The Salt River Review, and Synaesthetic.
His translations from the Russian can be found in Crossing Centuries: the New Generation in Russian Poetry and in The Manhattan and St. Ann’s reviews.
He was born in Chernovtsy, Ukraine and lives in New York City.