by Richard Greene
Is there a word for the fading of a note
as it leaves the string and nothing follows?
Their lives, like the last lifting of the bow,
reach towards a silence that completes them.
These aged, accomplished women taught
music, algebra, art, grammar, latin
to Catholic girls who came for polish
to this school, now two lifetimes old.
Tonight, the last concert before the doors
close, they sit quietly on stacking chairs
in the low-ceilinged auditorium,
listening to choir after choir singing
brilliantly, voices added to memory.
My daughter's school for one year, I know it
only by what I see this night, the photographs
of long-skirted athletes smiling towards
a now-unfolded future and of girls
holding violins and cellos in sepia,
tuning the long strings of the century.
The heavy oak of stairs and railings
and the fortifying stone speak of some
intended permanence that has had its day.
How certain the enterprise of Irish
faith to bring a city of sailors to God
through its daughters, lift the reprobate town
by their music, books, piety, beat down
sin by corporal means, the corrective
leather to make virtue and a good accent.
In time, something in them opened to the world,
their grammars grew sensitive to plurals,
odd conjugations, things outside the rule.
The years softened discipline: the tyrant
nun at twenty learned tolerance by sixty
in a world of back-answers and short skirts,
too late, perhaps, to temper satirists
recycling schtick through T.V.'s middle age.
Fifty or sixty years of the cloister
have taught the nuns a quietness that holds
before the students, and there are no tears,
but all their lives they loved in the work
and now their loss is likewise given
to the air in this evening's sense of things
done well to the last, apt valediction.
For them, love was always a deference
to the good, and tonight the orchestra
of strings pours out Pachelbel's Canon,
the achievement of these women's lives worked out
by bows lightly drawn across instruments
in the hands of girls who barely fathom
what sorrow is in the perfect thing they make
or what trust in the silence that follows.
