Davin Faris:

This poem was sparked by a wonderful performance of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra at my college. I remember leaving the auditorium, walking out into the cold January twilight, still adrift in the currents of the music. The lamps were flickering, the icy wind gusting. Something about the composition of the night felt more, loose at the edges, suffused with an inutterable significance. The symphony was still echoing in the bricks, the dead leaves. It all meant something, but for a while, I wasn’t sure how to put it into words.

In writing this poem — in most of my poems, really — I tried to name that half-glimpsed significance. For me, that meant evoking music on a universal scale. It’s true that scientists can eavesdrop on cosmic background radiation, leftover heat still crackling around from the Big Bang. The idea of that immense melody echoing in the instruments of the orchestra became inescapable for me in the drafting process. That symmetry is at the heart of what I want to say. The inconceivable and the daily, the human and the cosmic, encountering each other in a sort of fleeting pas de deux.

Imagine it: even now, your atoms are singing along to the same old tune. If we’re lucky, we might even hear a few measures while we’re here.