Claire Keyes
Carmina Suburba
A fiery collage of Medieval song, twisted hymns and Latin chants, the dissonant and divine: Carmina Burana. At rehearsals we line up, one behind the other, hands on shoulders, necks, kneading, kneading, a slap down the spine, then back up to stir the sounds within. Single, alone, I joined the chorus at a hiatus in my life. Now here are one hundred of us, male balancing female, suburban choristers hailing the Goddess Fortuna, our eyes fixed on our conductor, his eyes swerving towards his favorite tenor. The men’s drinking song calls up college days, carousing in taverns, sawdust floors, stale smoke, beer-soaked boys. As if those raucous times rolled on, the basses and tenors beckon all to come and drink, sopranos and altos responding to the lusty choristers until the music’s exuberance stamps itself on my heart, the dancers leaping onto stage to perform with us in a swirl of reds and blacks, acrobatic and daring in their coupling.
Claire Keyes is the author of The Question of Rapture, a collection of poems. Professor Emerita at Salem State College, where she taught English for thirty years, she has also written The Aesthetics of Power: The Poetry of Adrienne Rich, newly published in paperback in 2009 by the University of Georgia Press. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Calyx, The Valparaiso Review, and The Women’s Review of Books, among others. She is a resident of Marblehead, Massachusetts.
