I didn’t know how I’d crave it, black and long like a bar, taking a stool, fingers dropping onto strings, lining up shots of sound. At fifteen, in France, I bought three records, Pablo Casals playing Bach. Packed them in the bottom of my suitcase for the journey home. Never thought I’d put the instrument down. When I did, I didn’t expect it would be thirty years before I picked it up again, that three hundred years after they were written I’d clamber to drink in those Suites, requisite movements, fingers stiffened through variation, repetition, keeping me upright as the world slid.
Alison Hicks is author of poetry collections You Who Took the Boat Out and Kiss, a chapbook Falling Dreams, and a novella Love: A Story of Images. Her work has appeared in Eclipse, Gargoyle, Green Hills Literary Lantern (nominated for a Pushcart prize), Permafrost, and Poet Lore. She is founder of Greater Philadelphia Wordshop Studio, which offers community-based writing workshops.
