Dave Bonta takes us through a classical concert, and he looks at it with a mix of reverence and mischief. The images keep turning the music into something bodily and slightly unsettling: brass becomes "flesh," a piccolo shrieks like a rabbit caught by an owl, and swelling clarinets and cellos are compared to "unexpected tumors." Even the conductor is a thin figure bobbing in the piano's dark surface.
At the same time, the poem pokes gently at concert etiquette. The hall is almost a church, humming "for the holy," and the audience must not cough, laugh, or whisper. Performers are asked to escape their bodies or fill their lungs with light, yet the poem keeps dragging everything back to flesh and animals. The speaker seems to feel both drawn in and amused by the solemnity. The mood is hushed and strange, a little comic, and it ends with release, as applause arrives like surf and lets everyone breathe and make noise again.