That's where you'll find me...

Friday, May 21, 2010

Night Music

I often find myself here floating on my back in the dark. Midnight long since struck. Weightless. Waiting. Watching for any creeping light. Listening to this ancient house breathe. It's bones creak. But there's something that has wound its way around me. From somewhere, a far flung corner above, comes that faint string of sound. Low and precise. Barely a beginning or an end. It sets something alight behind my brow. I have searched his room for an instrument. Pulled tattered violin cases from under his bed, behind his wardrobe and found only remnants. A slender neck, a tuning peg, a bow shedding horse hair. All too worn to fit together and create something living...

In the mornings he is deathly still.
I hold a mirror to his mouth just to be sure, for he can't even be heard.
He's never spoken a word to me although I have nursed him since I was a child. On the first day of every Spring I scrub his dank room with Bergamot. Hope to cast some sort of spell to bring him back to this life. I tried once to open his dust laden curtains to allow a small sliver of light to illuminate his eternal dark.
He screamed like a hung cat. The sliver driven straight into his brain. His body electrified in seizure - fingers clawing at his milky eyes and tearing his skin.
I didn't sleep for days, his terror ringing in my ears and reverberating in my chest.

There.
The change to a perfect third above. The salt water of the ocean on which I'm afloat is drawn through my hollow chest, my arid throat and mouth to spill into my caverns of my eyes. The overflow soaking my hair, my pillow and mattress and dripping onto the floor. Puddles quickly turn to lake. The slow and steady rise of the tide swallowing piles of books, a birdcage, my father's top hat and gloves. It's warm and I can feel it sealing in my ankles and wrists, pooling in the hollow of my neck. It reaches my mouth, claims my cheekbones and forehead, finding its origins and I am suspended in it.
And it's quiet.
And it's touch.
And I can breathe.

1 comment: