It takes a long time to find
a suitable reed.
Found, you must take a blade
and shape
and soak
and tongue her properly.
Only then,
let the clarinet
bubble up from the bass
to a high trill.
Here on the keyboard,
I’ll strike a middle C
bold and bright.
Hold that note.
Return to it.
There’s nothing minor
in this duet.
Nothing flat.
This is something major.
Sounding in my single note, and your legato:
Our accord.
Rosemary Herbert
Rosemary Herbert, 74, of Akron, Ohio, creates genre-spanning work including poetry, literary criticism, journalism, reference volumes, and mystery and mainstream fiction. Her books include the Edgar Award-nominated The Oxford Companion to Crime & Mystery Writing and A New Omnibus of Crime, The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories, Whodunit? A Who's Who in Crime & Mystery Writing, and Front Page Teaser: A Liz Higgins Mystery. She has reviewed for the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post, and contributed interviews to The Paris Review and Harvard Review. Her poetry appears in Radar Poetry, where her poem was selected as “Notable” in the 2024 Coniston Prize competition; in The Last Milkweed: An Autumnal Anthology of Poetry (Tupelo Press); Tiny Seed Literary Journal and their Poetry of the Wild Flowers anthology; and more. She won first prize in the Dreamers 2024 Haiku Contest. She has worked as a reference librarian at Harvard University, as book review editor and garden columnist at the Boston Herald, and did field work on an archeological dig in Winchester, England.