North Carolina Literature in a Global Context
N C L R ONLINE
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FINALIST, 2014 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE BY RICHARD BETZ
Perfect Pitch There may be nothing perfect after all But my father’s pitch pipe, The Master Key, Nestled in its blood-red velvet-lined box, That I inherited with his yellowed sheet music: Its single brilliant clarion note – A440 – That called so many a cappella choirs to order, Snapping a dozen dozing ears to attention, Pitched in the cavernous chancel silences.
COURTESY OF TYNDALL GALLERIES
It was the single slimmest arc of rising Sun on the breathless ocean at dawn, The first bright stitch, the audacious knot, Prelude to the prelude in a puzzle of music. He knew how rare true absolute pitch could be, “One in a thousand,” he would tell me, To hit that note pure and unreferenced, Archer’s arrow shot true from tautness, Poem un-baffled, without forethought or revision. To see the world like that! – the sighing wind Lifting the hemlock boughs with a gentle baton As the great good choir begins to sing.
Sonatina in A (tapestry, linen and wool, 43x41) by Silvia Heyden
Hear RICHARD BETZ read “Perfect Pitch” at the 2014 North Carolina Writers Conference. Betz grew up in New England but has lived in North Carolina for almost fifty years, first in Asheville and for the past thirty years in Highlands. An outdoorsman and an avid runner, he has run nineteen marathons, including the 2011 Boston Marathon. He is married and has one daughter. His poetry has been published in college literary magazines, including those of Rollins College (where he graduated cum laude with a degree in English Literature) and Vanderbilt University, as well as regional publications in Asheville and Macon County. Betz’s poem “Picking Blackberries on Yellow Mountain Road,” a finalist in the 2012 Applewhite competition, was published in NCLR Online 2013. See his other 2014 finalist poem in the 2015 print issue.
Durham resident SILVIA HEYDEN was born and educated in Switzerland. She studied in the Bauhaus tradition at the School of Arts in Zurich and as a young artist won the Achievement Award of the City of Zurich. She moved to the US in 1953, and to Durham, NC, in 1966, when her husband, Dr. Siegfried Heyden, was named professor of medicine at Duke University Medical Center. Soon after, she gained an international reputation for her tapestries. Her work has been exhibited at the Duke University Museum of Art, the Mint Museum, and the North Carolina Museum of Art, as well as in Switzerland, Italy, and Germany. Her tapestries are in many major private and corporate collections in the US and Europe. See more of her work in Tyndall Galleries.