Still Life

        Music is food:
        fresh fruit for the senses
        crisp bites of notes

        chewy mouthfuls of sound
        rolled on the tongue
        to savor each subtle flavor:

        Apples like bright trumpets
        biting through a tight skin
        for a taste high and sharp

        Pears like soft saxophones
        dripping sweet and flowing
        almost syrupy

        Bananas like mellow trombones
        long and smooth

        Nuts like taut drums
        cracked crisp in quick taps

        French horns like sticky figs
        Peaches fuzzy and tart like oboes
        Violins in bunches of dark grapes
        And a huge watermelon tuba.

        After the players, the crowd
        after the curtain, the applause
        sound, still sound, remains

        still music to be tasted
        still with a life of its own
        still as a scene of painted fruit
         

           
            By Charles H. Tidwell, Jr, in Blue Buffalo: A Magazine of Recent Alberta Writing, 2.1 (Fall 1983): [28]