TO GEORGE, THROUGH THE ORANGE PLAINS OF SKY

by John Linstrom

George Winston, a pianist and composer whose unadorned melodies sought to evoke seasonal rhythms of nature and became a signature style of New Age music in the 1980s with popular albums such as Autumn and December, died June 4 in Williamsport, Pa. He was 74. —The Washington Post, June 9, 2023

Today I heard you’d died.
It’s been a strange day.
Wildfire smoke swept from Quebec
down the Atlantic seaboard

and darkened the air of Manhattan
where years ago I saw you play
a benefit concert with my wife
who I was only dating then—

a moon hung above the stage
where you sat and your fingers
stretched over the cold keys
pulling forth arpeggiated chords

from my memory. Your album
December the only thing my mother
could listen to when giving birth.
Today I wonder what labor falls

upon the lands of Canada, the airs

of home, while frightful golden plains
bridge the continent as thick fallen sky,
the smell filtered through spectral masks we

kept too ready, and George, I want to know
what we will do without you, without
your hands and heart, what the land will be

without passing through the mystery of your mind.

John Linstrom’s first book of poetry, To Leave for Our Own Country, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in April 2024. Linstrom is a writer, a Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Climate and Inequality at the Climate Museum in New York City, and the Series Editor of The Liberty Hyde Bailey Library for Cornell University Press. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including Northwest Review, Writers Resist, North American Review, The Christian Century, and Cold Mountain Review. He lives with his wife and baby daughter in Queens.