“Dispatch From a New York Times Article the Day Mary Oliver Died.” A Poem by Megan Gannon

—with lines from her poems

In a small city in Italy, a woman removes her shoes,
cups them to her chest, and tiptoes the cobblestone streets.

Dogs are carried on their walks. Neighbors greet each other
with sudden smiles, a jerky wave, then pass in silence.

What more could I do with wild words?
Coffee shops set cups into saucers lined with napkins,

and in the museum behind five blocks of blocked-off streets
the instruments someone deemed mankind’s most precious

are being played for eight hours, six days a week.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing—

that inside the building, the air crouches in darkened ducts.
A light bulb buzzes, and a velvet glove reaches up to untwist it.

Microphones, sensitive as telescopes trained on space,
are tuned instead to our human gasps and tappings,

(and what has consciousness come to anyway, so far?)
to the rasp of horsehair across catgut and a sound

too rich for most ears to distinguish from a violin
made last year in a factory. This is how we are as humans:

someone with sharper senses tells us to look, listen,
to learn something by being nothing,

and we trust them to know what will make us whole.
The recordings will be digitized and broken, new music

constructed from the pieces of arpeggios played
by instruments soon too brittle to be touched.

Is it necessary to say any more?
The instruments will be laid in their soft cases.

The pegs will slowly loosen their precise tuning,
and the stillness inside the holes the shapes of seahorses

will make a music none of us can hear—or bear to hear—
tending, as all music does, towards silence.

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From Dispatch from Every Second Guess. Used with the permission of the publisher, Dzanc Books. Copyright © 2026 by Megan Gannon.