Vistas & Byways Review - Fall 2019
  • Contents
    • In This Issue
    • Fiction
    • Nonfiction
    • Poetry
  • About Us
  • Contributors
  • Submissions
  • Archive
    • SPRING 2019
    • Fall 2018
    • SPRING 2018
    • FALL 2017
    • FALL 2016
    • SPRING 2016
    • FALL 2015

Music
​Poetry

Diminue: A Sestina
by Janice Fuhrman


​Your fingers depress keys on the piano, music
filtering through our lives, as the day
lets go of light
its history
fades into memory and inside me a sinking
builds, from being mortal, a spindlier member of the human
 
race. As age hovers over all humans,
I am drawn to the lonely strings of musical
notes rising and sinking
with the rhythm of ordinary days
like the bruising ebb and flow of history
like the pale light
 
shimmering in your weathered eyes, the light
I still see whenever I yearn for the lilt of a human
story
weaving its triumphant patterns, or music
softening a lined face, or days
unencumbered by bad dreams, sinking
 
sinking, sinking
into us. With us. Searching for the light
of youth when days
burst with more than twenty-four hours, when we believed in humanity
the freedom and music
of life, of all our stories.
 
Her story, his story
was everyone’s in our age of ages, sinking
then rising with the dawn’s bird music
suffusing all with light
as rotations of the earth, our fleeting days,
reveal our fragile humanness
 
the slow blinding dissolve of human
life. Yet there is no end to our stories.
Sunlit days
linger, stars and planets appear and sink,
the weight of existence lighter.
Music

​is scrambled but still sweet. We blitz from birth to death, forte to pianissimo. Music
fades, but still sings, light
dims but still sees. We do not peacefully sink. 
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
As a journalist, ​Janice Fuhrman  has been published in major newspapers around the world, and from 1987 to 1992, she was a foreign correspondent in Tokyo, Japan. As a wine writer, her stories and columns have been published in magazines and newspapers, including the San Francisco Chronicle. She is the author of several wine books. She has a travel website, Fuhrmantations.com. In her briefer career as a lawyer, she practiced in the area of Elder Law.
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IN THIS ISSUE

FICTION

NONFICTION

POETRY

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Vistas & Byways Review is the semiannual journal of fiction, nonfiction and poetry by members of Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at San Francisco State University​.​
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Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at San Francisco State University​ (OLLI at SF State) provides communal and material support to the Vistas & Byways  volunteer staff.

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  • Contents
    • In This Issue
    • Fiction
    • Nonfiction
    • Poetry
  • About Us
  • Contributors
  • Submissions
  • Archive
    • SPRING 2019
    • Fall 2018
    • SPRING 2018
    • FALL 2017
    • FALL 2016
    • SPRING 2016
    • FALL 2015