What to Take

Abstract

What to Take Barbara Ras (bio) From the drummer, take the cymbals, the crash, and hi-hatand walk like you’re shining. From the composer take “waterunder snow is weary,” sung by young voices in the timbreof wind blowing through the antlers of reindeer. From the organ-maker take the names of the stops, night horn,vox celeste, and chimney flute, instrumental sustainsthat theoretically go on forever. Eternity eludes the NRAand ants, who cannot hear, but I swear that following Rachmaninoff ’s Second Piano Concerto notefor note while rain sledgehammered the road the firsttime I drove to Swannanoa, got me there safely.From a gypsy, take any castanets offered, and play them first thing to get you out of bed, despitethe news of nine dead in Charleston who invited Dylann Roofinto their prayer service at the Emanuel A.M.E. Churchwhere he repeatedly shot the gun, whose one note is death. Take a chance. Take guns away and ask peopleto hum more, to whistle, if, unlike me, they know how,to talk often, like baby turtles, who startvocalizing inside their eggs. Every river’s original name was water weeping, waterlaughing. Take the call of a cricket or a ricochet of crickets,each with its own thumbprint. Take the cry of a bushbaby at nightthat narrows to next to nothing the distance between it and us, both our wailings scored by loneliness, bothshocking the night air, calling for kin, calling for help to perpetuatethe species. Take a lesson from the bushbaby with its esotericallylarge eyes that see what we don’t see, its paws and mouth that eat whatever they kill. [End Page 598] Barbara Ras barbara ras’s first collection of poems, Bite Every Sorrow, was chosen by C. K. Williams to receive the 1997 Walt Whitman Award. In 1999, Ras was named Georgia Poet of the Year. Her books include One Hidden Stuff andThe Last Skin. She is the editor of a collection of short fiction in translation, Costa Rica: A Traveler’s Literary Companion. She has been on the faculty of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Ras currently lives in San Antonio, where she directs Trinity University Press. Copyright © 2016 The Massachusetts Review, Inc.