When I decide to go to hear Handel's Messiah in London
at the composer's parish church, my husband says
he'd rather see a Thai horror movie, so we plan to meet later
at our favorite Moroccan lair that serves huge platters
of olives and fried goat brains, but here I am sitting in the pew
next the president of the Handel Society, who tells me
I've taken the seat of his wife who has another engagement,
and I see her sitting next to my husband watching
Shimabam Rampapoolajib rip the throat of a nubile virgin,
then run through a seedy bar in Bangkok
and down an alley way to the Chao Phraya River,
much like the river of music flowing over me,
and the president of the Handel Society explains that in England
they stand for the Hallelujah chorus, and I assure him
we Yanks do, too, and I think of the last time I heard this music
I was with my mother in Honolulu and we both stood
as hundreds of voices soared over us like the gods exhaling
a golden brew of divine moonshine, but here in London
the chorus is only 20 voices, like a group of friends whispering
the secret to each other and maybe I'm wrong
about the Thai movie, because I'm often wrong about almost everything,
for example politics—I can't believe my mother
continues to vote against her own best interests because her father,
dead over 50 years, voted that way, and why do people
have multiple sex partners because everyone knows about germs,
not to mention Staphylococcus, fungus, MRSA, nits,
river blindness, and Ebola, and maybe the flying monsters
over Bangkok are more moving than sitting in this church
where the great musician sat and listened to his glorious aria,
“I know that my Redeemer liveth,” and though I don't believe
those stories anymore than I believe in Mothra over Tokyo, I do believe
in the notes swimming over me like a river of fireflies
on a summer evening, and when the concert is over I say goodbye
to my new friend, who during the intermission
introduced me to all his friends, men in three-piece pinstriped suits
and tidy haircuts, and I walk out into the December evening,
and if there isn't a flurry of snow there should be, and I am so alone
in this chilly night walking to the Oxford tube stop,
and I would love to see Satan bursting through the starry firmament,
but there are no stars, only a stew of fog, and let's face it
all our monsters are bivouacked in our chests like dyspeptic soldiers
in a mercenary army, hungry, covered in warts
or contagion of some kind, too walleyed and stupid to see
they are flesh and blood and there's a glorious song
somewhere inside waiting to be sung in a church or an opera house
or even a pub where One-Eyed Walter is playing an accordion,
while a drunk warbles on a rusty flute, and Janet, the scullery maid,
her sweet soprano like a tiny bird, fluttering out
of a corner so dark it might be mistaken for an entrance to hell.