sitting in their straight-backed chairs, one sister

playing Simple Gifts, the other a set of Coltrane

riffs she remembers from the last time she danced

before she saw, clear, God’s hand wipe dusk into night.

A love supreme and then you come down right

on the tonic. They can make a reed last a long time.

When it cracks, they fashion another from wicker

and never forget the more ecstatic dances of Utopia:

Mother Anne may I? Father, listen. Children, go.

And we will stay here in the woodshop, singing, stomping,

and saxing it up in the symmetrical, resonant meeting hall,

the kitchen, and eventually the everlasting future, all our

walls decked in pure white and the barest blue pigment

made from berries, so ecstatic in the fall as we work,

when we discover love is brittle and enough, when love

is little, a set of sounds so simple, so right and supreme.