John Cage: 4'33"

(Bleu III, by Joan Miró)

The man and woman walked the auditorium's halls during intermission, opening a series of doors until they came across a large closet, stocked with costumes and abandoned props. The pair slipped inside and shut the door.

After an hour of Stravinsky, the rest of the audience sank mercifully into their watered-down drinks and conversation. Nobody saw the couple's smiles drop the moment she took his neck in her hand. Searching his eyes for the match he'd struck. A shade of color half deeper than her own. Breaths thick with carbon as she pulled him near and nearer, but still--and still--too desperately far.

Slowly, he backed her against the wall. She arched her back against its chill, breasts nearly brushing his black lapel. The epaulet from a naval uniform tickled her shoulder, and the thin strap of her dress slid down.

Her head glanced to the side. His eyes held. The lights flashed on, then off, then on again, as his lips sank to her neck and the heat coursed through her like a socket's scream.

Intermission was up. 

***

The older couple seated in orchestra left hadn't cared for Stravinsky. Season tickets or not, the man wasn't keen on coming out this evening. His hip ached when he sat in one position for too long, and now he had Cage's silence-as-art to suffer through. He liked Bach and Beethoven. Mozart and Schumann. If that made him plebeian, so be it. He'd been called worse in life. 

The conductor strode onto the stage. The audience clapped. At least modernity was an impatient affair. All of 4 minutes and 33 seconds, from the start to what, he assumed, would pass for an ending. He glanced at his watch. The second hand sighed past six and swept back up.

The piece began. Piece, being generous. The orchestra was made into a mockery of itself. He sniffed, rather too loudly, and his wife gave him a look. Shrugging, he stretched his leg into the aisle. 

Coughs sounded like gunshots in the cavernous space. Someone's cell phone vibrated. At least his ears were still sharp. He looked over at his wife's profile. A study of indifference. As mute as the pearls hanging off her ears.

Her hearing was going. A bit irritating for him lately. The number of times one had to say something in order to be understood. Not her fault, and yet . . .  

A sort of scratching came from over his left shoulder. Rhythmic. Repetitive. An eyelash tickling the pillowcase. Something of that magnitude. 

He leaned back and found the noise persisted, beneath the gustier hum of the building's electrics. Glancing over his shoulder, he detected nothing untoward. A wall. The sconce. A set of double doors. The brightly lit exit sign, in case of a fire. 

All these docile people, rushing for their lives. He tried to imagine it. Their force, crushing him.

The conductor raised and lowered his baton to indicate the start of the second movement. The performers turned blank sheets of music, breaking the tension in the room momentarily. Several people readjusted themselves. A few chuckled or cleared their throats. He did none of these things.

Instead, he leaned back further, into the pocket of bewitching static. It was a mouse in the attic, this scraping and knocking. A scurrying of electrons, some rapture of friction. 

An abandoned cell block of his memory lit up. His chest tightened.  

The pulse of life, with its charge and shock and sometimes spasm, bolted through. He drew his leg in and sat up in his seat, fully erect. Aware. Alert. He looked around himself, blinkingly. 

His wife, with her eyes closed. Lost in memories, perhaps. Regrets, possibly. How many of those included him? Had he told her she looked pretty tonight? He couldn't say. Where was she wandering to?

Where had she walked that he'd never touched? 

Woman sounds now. Sharp cries of mounting pleasure, haloed by a pressing need. He shook his head, but the breathlessness blossomed. Muffled, like a conscience. But as deeply acute. All his heat rushed his cheeks and center. His breaths were shallow. 

He was a man yet. A diminished man, but a man. Reaching over, he took hold of his wife's hand, resting limply on her knee.

Her eyes opened. She looked at him. 

Third movement. Final movement. One minute, in all its rapid movement.   

The tempo of the friction--the rhythm of the cries--grew faster and pitched higher.  She was tipping. Perilously close to the fracturing point. Taking his wife's hand, he placed it between his legs. Her eyes widened, staring at what her fingers touched as the woman in the wall split open, as her cries dove off their plaintive peak, swept into the surge of her lover's tide, out of time's rotating door, where a hall of silence received them.  

From behind them rose a giggle. 

The woman he loved looked into his eyes. Her hand closed around him as the audience began to clap and cheer.

The conductor bowed. Their foreheads touched.

4'33".

Barefoot in Bach

I want to write about music tonight.

No, that’s not right. I want to play music tonight.

But since my skills are fairly feeble at the piano, and my kids are soaking up some gamma rays from the television, I will try to write about music instead.

And completely fail to do it justice.

There must be a reason for this divide. For the distance between words and notes, and the emotional effects they conjure in us.

Writers have to design emotion like a slow and meticulous spider spinning its web. It’s an intellectual process, at its very foundation. Readers absorb words in a similar way. Poetry—particularly free verse—is the closest we writers can get to being the conduits, and not the architects. While music . . . well, music is IV emotion shooting straight to the heart.

Doesn’t seem fair, does it?

If books and film are story-driven and wide, music is moment-contingent and deep. Complete immersion. Suspension. What I choose to listen to often shapes my mood like liquid being poured into an elastic and evolving reservoir. A song’s meaning is also layered by its past listenings, until we are moving through a grand canyon of visceral memory. In one sense, the emotion a song conjures deepens with every play (until we’ve worn it out, that is), and nostalgia is often the space/time harmony accompanying the melody itself.

So anyway. Where was I going with this again?

I’ve been listening to Bach lately. Specifically, his Goldberg Variations. More specifically, Glenn Gould’s impassioned, if eccentric, recordings of the Goldberg Variations.

And what does it conjure? Well, to explain it is to dilute its essence. It’s draining the immediacy of that liquid immersion. But I’ll try, anyway.

There is a bright, glassy clarity to Bach’s sound. Even his more melancholy variations have such a strength of structure stabilizing them that I know I’ll never be opened up too wide, or dragged too low. If I close my eyes while listening to the Goldberg Variations, I’m barefoot in the summer grass, feeling the cool specificity of each blade underfoot, as I walk, tiptoe, or dash across the lawn (not a field or wilderness—that’s too overgrown and hopelessly wandering for Bach).

I like its pure lines. The transfer of structure and calm (if only in the moment, alas). My thoughts may wander to the clouds while listening to Bach, but my heart is centered in my chest, and again, my feet are earth-bound.

Bach is a soothing balm when thoughts have become too overheated and unwound.

Yet music can also be emotionally dangerous. There is a darker landscape of song that not only shapes our mood, but saturates it to the point of masochism and pain. How can it wield such a power over us? Power that even the most beloved book cannot hope to duplicate for immediate impact.

And more intriguingly, why on earth would we invite it?

So many parts of our lives are not pliable. They’re fixed, like the bricks in a wall. Or the words on a page. Which provides stability and continuity, but also limits our freedom. Yet there are no barriers to where our hearts and souls might wander when we close our eyes, and press play. Or if, by some stroke of enviable fortune, we can play an instrument ourselves. It’s intoxicating to travel in that canyon, if also slightly treacherous for what it seems to paint on our lids and promise in the other world. For what it fails to deliver when our eyes snap back open at the end of the song, and only white silence embraces us.

Most of the great rock and pop songs are about desire of some sort. It’s no surprise. Desire is restless, fluid. Desire is eternal. And so is music.

We are not, but want to be. We desire desire. We want to live in the canyons of songs. Forever.

So have I gotten anywhere here with all of this? I don’t know. All that water seems to have slipped through my fingers . . . my web.

Aw, screw it.

Just listen to Bach, and kick off your shoes with me.

Giant

I hear
the jingle-jangle of
guitar chords strumming
a clean and simple tune,
Your cracked voice plowing
the dark lands of
knuckled earth,
Where wonder is the
crop, and bewilderment
the field

How strange it is
to be anything at all

If I could
swallow that truth
from your lantern lips
while belching its
cosmic uncertainty,
It might
(or might notly)
lift into a beanstalk
for the Jack-of-all-doubts
who flip-flops
within a mouth
of mirrors
I guess I’ll call

My soul




-----

The song is from Jeff Magnum,
when he was with Neutral Milk Hotel.
It's titled "In the Aeroplane Over The Sea."
The lyric in the poem's middle is taken from it.

Maestro

She stood naked before him. Fingers grazing her thighs. Chin level. Strong eyes.

“What are you doing?” he said, the acoustics of the stage sharpening his footfalls.

She would not answer. She would not make a sound. Even when he walked behind her, and brushed the small of her back with the silk of his tie.

“What. Are you. Doing?”

His breath trapped the heat on her neck. His body a lightning rod for her dark electricity. Energies pulsed, nerves begged. She felt neither liquid, nor solid.

But still she stood.

“We can’t here,” he said, his eyes flicking to the wings. “You know this. We’d both be sacked.”

Yet his fingers traced the curve of a harp on her hip, as her skin softened a conductor’s spine.

“What is your game?” he murmured into her hair, while his arms slipped around. Her belly fell soft, but she didn’t suck in. His touch sank deeper.

The truth of those fingers thickened her senses and squeezed her thoughts, until she was a single, tuned string, demanding to be played upon. She leaned into the hard line of him, and they fell between the infinite folds of stage left's curtain.

She turned in the velvet darkness, and moved to kiss him. His lips parted for their prize.

Instead, her mouth slid to his ear.

“There,” she whispered.

He pulled away.

“There, what?”

“Hold this. The desire. This need,” she said, looking long into his eyes. “Every time you’re up there, pressured to inspire us with that magic wand of yours. I want you to look at me, really look at me.”

She touched the air above his cheek. He shuddered.

“And be full of this almost thing.”

---

("Symphony Painting" by Valerie Vescovi)

Stacks

“There’s a new moon tonight,” the mother said.

“It's just all black.”

“It’s still there, honey. Circling somewhere. Waiting to grow again.”

The daughter picked a piece of dead skin from her lip.

“I know,” she said. “I-I’m sorry.”

“What for?”

“I don’t know. I thought saying it might help. There’s this weight on my chest. I can’t break free. I keep trying, but—” She struggled for breath. “It just sits back down.”

“Push it away.”

“I don’t know how.”

The mother took her daughter’s shoulders, searching for her eyes. “Yes, you do.”

“No. It won’t leave. Trying and failing makes me feel worse.”

“What’s your answer, then?”

The daughter choked on her teeth, hair slipping over her eyes.

The mother sat back. Listening to the pulse of the night.

“Come with me,” she said.

“Where?”

“Anywhere.”

The daughter's cheek twitched. “What do you mean?”

“I mean we’ll drive until we find a place where the moon is always full.”

“Mom.”

“All right. Then until the weight is gone.” She placed her palm over her daughter’s heart, feeling its shredded beat. “And if that doesn’t work, we’ll come up with something else.”

The tears came, but the daughter didn’t hide behind her hair. Instead, she found the clear, blue moons of her mother's eyes.

“Okay,” she whispered.

“Okay.”

---

This vignette was inspired by Bon Iver's song, re: Stacks.

--This is not the sound of a new man
or crispy realization
It's the sound of the unlocking
and the lift away
Your love will be
safe with me

Valentine's Mix

Ella put them in a sentimental mood.

They got lost with Chet.

Bob invited her to lay across the big brass bed.

By then, they didn't really need Norah to turn them on.

They were already the thing songs are shadows of.


(If music be the food of love, play on...and Happy Valentine's Day!!)

---

Track listing:

1. In A Sentimental Mood, Ella Fitzgerald
2. Let's Get Lost, Chet Baker
3. Lay Lady Lay, Bob Dylan
4. Turn Me On, Norah Jones

Baby, It's Cold Outside

“God, I’m stuffed,” he said. “I think I just broke a commandment or something.”

“A deadly sin, you mean,” she said, smiling. “Gluttony, right?”

He glanced at her legs folded on his couch. Her skirt rode higher when she sat like that.

Black stockings.

“Yeah, right.”

“I didn’t know a table could hold that much food,” she said. “I think I heard wood groaning.”

He bit the flesh of his cheek. Hard.

“Nah, that was my dad’s chair. Begging for mercy.”

She swatted him on the arm. They caught the glow of the TV in one another’s eyes. Quiet laughter died.

Staring at the muted football game, each grew painfully aware. The silence dragged into the fourth quarter. Game tied.

“Well, thanks for inviting me, Steve. It was a really nice gesture.”

Her feet struck the ground. Slipping those heels on.

“Oh. No problem. I know it sucks to be away from family on Thanksgiving.”

“And thanks for the record player! Yeah . . . wow.”

She was nodding really fast. Wine glass now consigned to coaster.

“Sure. I never really use it anymore.”

“Speaking of which,” she said, jabbing her thumb toward the door. “I should go ahead and load it in my car.”

“Really?” He cleared the whine from his voice. “I mean, it’s pretty cold out there.”

He shivered to prove it.

“Yeah, I should get on the road. ”

“It’s supposed to snow . . . ”

Her lips curved. A bit.

“Probably all the more reason I should go. Otherwise, I might be trapped here. Overnight.”

“Oh. Right.” His cheeks felt like two chestnuts, roasting. “Sorry.”

“Unless . . . ”

He pounced.

“What?”

“Unless you have some good records here?”

On the television, some guy kicked a field goal.

“I think I can find something.” He stood, passing into the hallway. His pace struggled to match his smoking blood, but it was a losing ballgame.

“Steve!”

He turned.

Her ankles crossed on his coffee table. No heels. Wine glass cradled in her lap.

She grinned.

“Make it something warm, okay?”

---

[Ray Charles and Betty Carter singing the holiday classic]

Kansas In August

I have a confession to make. This...

...still does it for me.

Yes, I'm as corny as Kansas in August. As high as a flag on the Fourth of July.

For I'm still in love with the musical.

The love affair began with an old Bing Crosby/Fred Astaire pic. I watched Holiday Inn about a hundred times throughout elementary school, before moving onto the slightly saucier Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers pairing in Top Hat.

Then came Julie Andrews electrifying those hills in The Sound of Music. Sweet Edelweiss! The obsession deepened. My friend and I made up our own lyrics to Do-Re-Mi (Ray--a name you call a guuuuuuy!) in middle school. My bedroom walls sprouted posters of My Fair Lady and The Phantom of the Opera. From that point until college, I was basically lost to modern music.

Smells like Teen Spirit? Whatever. I had no need for irony.

And maybe that's the point.

Musicals are escapist by nature. They’re not interested in the literal reflection of reality. Rather, musicals scrounge whatever sincerity they can from our world and tack it to the loftier longings of our ideals. It's a bridge as ephemeral as moonlight, but as potent, too. When characters’ emotions are so intense and driving that they cannot be contained in mere speech, they must be exorcised through song. What a beautiful, generous transparency to share that nakedness with another person! To be that corny, and not blink.

Which is why I kept watching, and listening. I wanted a part of the emotional bloodletting. A stage without self-consciousness. A purer state of being...yes. But also one in which the sunny optimism of Mitzi Gaynor from South Pacific could drain into the dark, desperate hope of Tony and Maria in West Side Story.

People are more in musicals. But they are still fundamentally true. There is brightness, and darkness.

And Somewhere, at least, we can slide across that spectrum without a second thought, or the slightest guffaw.

Haven't you heard?

The hills are alive...

---

So what's your favorite musical? Song?

Have you ever performed in a musical?

Or does the sight of a dimply-faced von Trapp make you want to pull a Sweeney Todd?

Let's discuss!

Dream

I had a dream
That I could fly from the highest swing.
I had a dream.

--Priscilla Ahn, Dream

It is a ramshackle house. An abandoned house.

This disappointed house.

My old bedroom window is blinded by vines. A creeping sort of killer. You don’t notice the slow strangulation until it’s already scaled the neck. And begun to squeeze.

Were my curtains yellow or pink? I don’t know. It’s been sixty years.

But I do remember the steam of my breath upon the icy windowpane. The secrets I penned within that fog. Rubbing out the pretty words before anyone could see.

Do houses have dreams?

I think so.

Does this one?

Not anymore.

Nightswimming

Nightswimming,
remembering that night.
September's coming soon,
I'm pining for the moon.

--R.E.M., Nightswimming

---

Bodies swollen by August's moon,
we sliced the surface glimmer

Me reaching for your hand,
you pulling deeper

---

"Nightswimming" has long been my favorite R.E.M. song. I think the lyrics, and the video, succeed in creating a genuinely naked, hopeful moment, even while mourning its passing. The nostalgia cuts deep in this one, but summer isn't over yet. Better take the plunge.

And on that note...

Any good skinny-dipping stories to share ? :)

I'm not particular. Day, or night, will do.

What do you remember?

Postcard

Mara,

I love you.

All this way, the shit I’ve seen, and that’s all I got. I love you.

I thought escape, escape! But distance just makes the heart sing louder. Until it’s a god-damn carousel in my ears, spinning me to sleep at night. I...love...you...

I want to touch you, consume you, make your body bend to mine. These roads are so weary, Mara.

I belong to you (I love you).

That’s all I am.

So please, baby. Please.

Sing me home.

Well there was a time when you let me know
What's really going on below
But now you never show that to me, do you?
But remember when I moved in you
And the holy dove was moving too
And every breath we drew was Hallelujah

--Jeff Buckley, performing Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah

[Photos of Ohio's Smallest Church, near Belpre]

Lay Your Head Down

And what I'm thinking of just this time
Why don't you lay your head down in my arms?
In my arms.
Lay your head down in my arms.

--Keren Ann, Lay Your Head Down

She had to make it out of the money room.

Words galloped from thoroughbred tongues, all piling into her right temple. A toxic clock marked her agony, while a door bewitched her with its slinky crevices. She wondered if she could turn the knob with the weight of her—

She had to make it out of the elevator.

It was supposed to count down the nine stories. But it was going up three . . . four . . . gritting her teeth, she saw the Kabuki faces around her growling with a feral pleasure, pawing at one another with claws and precious spittle. She rocked back on her heels and touched a cheek with her free hand. It was solid. This was still living. Squeezing closer to the wall, she became aware of a string around her heart, pulling her toward—

She had to make it onto the subway.

But a homeless man needed something from her.

“Please . . . please?”

She wasn’t sure who was speaking. The voice tore off that dull blade in her head she had conditioned to sheathing. But she speared her eyes to the yellow safety line until the man’s shadow lengthened, and the shrieking train spent its climax. The engine gasped, she relaxed, and the only shadow left on the platform was something like her, with all the color leaked out. The string around her heart kept its demands. Loosening her scarf, she let it drop to the tracks and slipped between a train's sliding doors.

She had to—

No.

She wanted inside the brownstone building.

The string was taut now. As rigid, and fine, as a spider’s arrow, spinning her into a warm web. It drew her up the stairs, and through the door.

Its other end lived in the den, upon the leather couch, in a land without clocks.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

He beckoned.

She came.

The skin of her face was smooth. His chest was not. She laid her head down, two dark shadows swirling into one. The string shimmered.

And danced.

[Painting by Marc Chagall]

La Vie En Rose

Give your heart and soul to me
And life will always be
La vie en rose

--Edith Piaf

Do you remember Paris afternoons?

When there was the impression of contact
as we lapped at a lazy sorbet,
and I pointed to the sky, saying,
That cloud looks like a Rodin
as dreamed by Monet.

You with your chocolate,
me my strawberry.
So when lips brushed lips,
we tasted of Valentine’s Day.

On a Paris afternoon.

The Elgar: Third Movement (The Wife Who Would Remember)

[Sorry for the long break in this series. If you need to reacquaint yourself with the previous installments, Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here.]


“She fed him my tongue.”

Nobody but the girl responds. And she sounds sad. Always so sad with that one. A sad clown’s leaky balloon.

“Pfffffffft.”

The spit bubbles pop. She giggles, and searches the opera box for an audience.

Why did he bring her?

“Mrs. Donovan?”

It’s more than the poor thing should bear.

Her pale blue eyes float without anchor above a sea of ninnies below. Notes shadow her ankles like silver fish, but she walks on water (he says, he says), and will not permit them air.

“Papa?”

The scrap of bone and hair beside her pats her hands and whispers, “Mrs. Donovan, your husband has just stepped out for a moment. You’re at the concert hall, Mrs. Donovan. The concert hall. It’s the Elgar tonight. Marvelous, isn’t she?”

She snaps back her hand, fingering the opal ring Mother lets her wear on special occasions. “I know where I am, Uncle.”

Dirty old man. Serpents for hands.

“Snakes can’t smell without tongues,” she says. “And sirens can’t sing.”

“All right, Mrs. Donovan. Let’s not worry yourself about such things.”

This thing gags her. She must escape.

Scurry, scurry hermit crab
Look for food that you can grab.
Search for shells that fit just right
Hide in them when it is night.

Dipping forward to grab the umbrella he extends to shelter her, a heart pours out yesterday’s water.

Bobbing to its waves, her mouth spills open. Milky eyes track the sea’s shifting lights. Until they are upon her. Until she glows within their timeless grace.

Don’t work yourself up over a silly girl’s machinations, Penny.

Her tongue licks the sea salt from her lips.

There is nothing to it, my love. Just let it go.

Let it go.

And so she had. And so she—

“Mrs. Donovan?” the voice insists. “Penelope?”

Surfacing, she gasps for air, scanning the dark skies. The gaudy chandelier burns softly now, like a mariner’s distant galaxy. The girl’s notes wobble, so far from the hearth of home.

There is salt on her tongue. Is.

She rises.

“I thought she cut it out.”

I did, I did?

“And fed it to him.”

I did, I did.

“Of course, Mrs. Donovan. Won’t you have a seat now? This movement is almost ended.”

The blue umbrella explodes like birds’ wings, and she lifts it above her head, ready to set sail.

“But now I don’t know,” she says, staring down at the girl—this ancient child—with the opal in her cello. “I really couldn’t say who—”

A few in the audience look up as she drifts near the rail.


To be continued...


[Cello: Jacqueline du Pré; Conductor and husband: Daniel Barenboim; video courtesy of markvogue]

Forget Me Not

When my spine is but a scar in the earth,
body broken of all toothsome need,
let some blood-germ of its longing
swamp white roots with this blue ballad

So when rigored beneath a bone moon,
my starry one might pluck a
hail-mary constellation,
inhale its light-years heat, and

remember

[Thanks to my favorite blog couple for
recommending the film, Somewhere in Time.
Its music is theirs (and Rachmaninoff's). Photo of
forget-me-nots in my "movie"
courtesy of Pete Harlow.]

The Elgar: Second Movement (Flight of the Hummingbird)

Part 1 is here


She had noted his backwards flight.

And softens her forward thrust.

Her mind disengages as the bow arm flirts and hovers like the wing of a hummingbird. The membranes of her muscle pulse across this movement’s petals and thorns, while not far below, darkness jaws. She relishes this suppleness from herself, and others. Athleticism rouses her from a digital bolero of play, and repeat.

Her heart is a pump.

Her heart. Is a pump.

Her heart—

She ran from the cottage until she reached the water’s edge, his baton a white flame in her fist. The afternoon heat marinated the cut grass, while the lake drank deep from the sun’s nectar. Spring is the season of miracles, someone had once told her. But all she believed in was the mud sucking at her toes, the cool breeze impaling her breast, before she thrashed away.

Positioning the baton between her teeth, she turned to confront him.

“Did you call her, Catherine?”

His color was high, his voice a broken string.

“Did you tell my wife about us?”

She spat out his stick in her hand.

“I did.”

He seized her by the shoulders, and shook. For a brief, ecstatic moment, she coveted his fury. Aiming the baton at his heart, she started to lunge.

But flesh is so fond of surrendering, even during a blood charge.

Her legs collapsed, and he sank into her like a man falling on his sword. She watched the baton sail from her hand, and find its measure of rest. She rested, too.

And the dandelions sloughed their seeds as two bodies swam up one another in a current of silence.

And the scent of lilac chloroformed the air.

And a bird dropped to earth, in search of sticks for a nest.

But she was deaf to earth and sense and time.

When her eyes opened, there were tears on her cheeks, though her own eyes were dry. The war drum in her chest reminded her, with its imperfect beat, that only death survives such sweet, terrible silence.

And so the woman who did not believe in miracles pushed her lover away. Cruel enough for him to remember his wife again. So far that his tears might swamp a lake.

She stood to track a bird with a baton in its beak.

Straining for it to conduct her in birdsong.

Her heart is a pump.

Her heart is a pump.

And so, she thinks, as the hummingbird finally falls dead, this fluid staining my cheeks must be blood-red.


To be continued...


[Cello: Jacqueline du Pré; Conductor and husband: Daniel Barenboim; video courtesy of markvogue]

The Elgar: First Movement (The Man Doomed to Love)

A conductor tenses his baton. A cellist draws her bow.

In an opera box, the man doomed to love checks his breath.

The initial thrum only shocks the spine, but there is a next—and a next—and a next—all plucking at and plundering the white nerves within. He seizes, his knees splay, the clean line of him shredding underneath her assault. Leads sweat, and spark. Vision blurs. An aging body slathers itself with the heat of Pavlovian memory.

The Elgar. Their concerto. Of some twenty, muted years.

He twists the leather glove to restrain his hands from conducting her, from molding her, from beseeching her for that final encore. The fierce abstinence bulges and quivers his neck like the slim reed between her fingers. Those instruments of torment, slashing across his back and chest. How she had bruised and bludgeoned him.

In her pretty dress.

With her pretty, pretty song.

Scars split their seams, and the liquid adagio of a sluggish heart courses into his autumnal skin. Blood surging faster than notes. Sweet delusions, the speed of light.

Their first concert.

Applause like firecrackers.

Her hot kiss on his ear.

The dressing room after.

A crashing of cymbals.

The long reverberation.

An orchestra throbs its gorgeous agony.

He is on point. Vibrato.

Her writhing stokes a golden frenzy about her shoulders as she rocks and inflames the wood between her thighs. A house of longing straddles her strings. She opens her worldly eyes. And smiles at her maestro.

The man doomed to love bites hard on the leather.

And tastes her skin.

Crying out, he lurches to his feet. The cancer of his need wrests him back, back. Back past his wife with her chorus of tears, back past his friends with their requiem faces, back past the velvet shroud . . . back . . . back . . .

Back to somewhere before.

Some time.

When he was his instrument.

And she was his song.


Find the Second Movement here.


[Cello: Jacqueline du Pré; Conductor and husband: Daniel Barenboim; video courtesy of markvogue]

Dirty Cello Thoughts, Part 1

If I permit these
knees to drift, like
so, will you pull your
eager string against
my tender bow?



[Yes, I'm learning the cello.
No, I sound nothing like Mischa Maisky.
But please, please listen to this Prelude to
Bach's Cello Suite No. 1, especially from
about 1:55 until the end.
It gets me every time.
Video courtesy of Bacholoji.]

Voiceless

Beneath the fountain dress and china smile, she is naked.

Her hands as rubbery as a toddler’s. Her ankles blush.

Beyond her toes, a collection of eyes glitters. Like coal in a mine, they are banking her light.

She clears her throat. Unfastens her tongue. Opens her mouth.

The darkness holds.

The pianist pauses, and circles back around the prelude, but warily, the chords kicking up dust.

Someone coughs.

He said he would come.
Saturday. January 19th. 1:00.

A cell phone shudders.

He said he would come.

The skittish woman in the front row bares her teeth.

He said . . . he said . . .

He said.

A heel clatters to the stage. Her hip swivels, and she lists to the side. The chill of the stage scales her leg, mounts her gut. She needs to pee.

The pianist loops again, his notes trailing red. The audience ripples like the spine of a caged beast.

Rescue me.

Her mouth gapes, but the melody is locked in her knees. Her heart flutters across the terra. There is no oxygen here.

“Please?”

The pianist relents. Silence rushes her from the wings. It sweeps her up and turns her upside down. Her eyes roll toward the ceiling.

The back door of the school auditorium blasts open as the stage lights flood her face. Her eyes snap to.

“Dad!”

His sunlight frees them all.

Oh, Daddy.

The beast fractures into hundreds of birds, all flapping their wings for her, all buoying her small, honest flight.

She slips on her shiny shoe, straightens her hips, and smiles or sobs. Music swims through her marrow, as the pianist strikes a sunny chord. She opens her mouth, so finally happy to sing her tragic song.


While underground, her canary heart trills,
He said! He said!

He said.

Variations

He had pianist hands.

She had night hair,
a woman's ivory back.

Their nocturne spelled the nightingales.

And made the cardinal blush.





[Glenn Gould/Bach video courtesy of kanfoosj]