Good Bye, Luciano

Luciano Pavarroti,
October 12,1935 – September 6, 2007


You sing in church with Fernando,
your father. You fall in love
with soccer, pull air deep into your lungs,
singing with your feet, always singing,
with still undiscovered perfect pitch.

You trade teaching for learning voice,
you trade talking, selling, for singing:
but that won’t work. Talking is
earthbound, and harder on the voice.
Nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae.

Are you something less than
three feet tall, when you climb
the table in the second room of your house,
and begin to sing, La Donna e Mobile?
Your voice is a feather that dances the wind …

Did you stop singing for a year,
when your voice was changing?
Was that the only time? Plucking
high C’s from the air, as though they
were cherries ... high F … Hail Mary.

Where is that mystical garland
of flowers, that throne so close
to the sun? Have you found them?
Sing to us still, sing to us and say
that perfection exists, that it is voice.

From two rooms, to one, you
move to a mansion of millions of listening
rooms. Singing of fantasy princesses,
you join ranks with a real one, to clear
minefields and help survivors.

A voice even beyond music, you
send notes and notes wherever they
will help … “You don’t need any brains
to listen to music.” And here the opera ends –
perché a questo punto il maestro è morto.