The night he went too deep with a needle
and the feeling drained out of his hand,
he saw his keyboard as a marriage bed,
wide as it was, where the widow hand
kept crossing sides, talking to itself:
a cloud of flesh in the ebony lacquer.
With every move, he made a music
so solitary and clear people closed
their eyes and swore there were two hands there,
that no great rift had come between them.
In his lap his fingers went cold as glass.
Not that he forgot them, not completely.
What tongue forgets the numb tooth beside it?
A certain strangeness brings them closer.
Nor was he consumed by the open grave
of his hand. But distance has its own life.
And if the art of soloing is how
the fingers leave their body and flutter back
refreshed, so it was with the whole arm
sleeping on his thigh. The music in it
kept emerging, the way a father's features
emerge in a son's—the shy turns of speech
and gesture, the transfiguring face.
When his hunger took him on bitter walks
in the West End, some force of privacy
conspired to restore him, some white flag
of steam rising out of the black street.
From a tattered chair in a basement flat,
he listened to Scriabin records, a wash-
cloth over his eyes, coffee boiling
in its pan: rain blurred the narrow windows.
And when they cleared, if you climbed the steps
to the cracked courtyard and looked up,
through the giant well of gray apartments
you could see a small rectangle of sky,
its blue page where the world began.
Sometimes he saw it when he slept, face down
as if he too were sky, blowing a hole
of sight through the floor beneath him.
What is dissonance, he thought, if not
a seam in the body, a sweet dread.
So when you lean into the sound and through,
the mind is a pupil floating in its eye,
descending into an unlit hallway.
Or a buried theater of eyes, glinting.
I think of him in that aging movie,
his head bowed and resting on its hinge,
a trap door to a deeper anonymity.
Who's to say how strung out he must
have been, if, as he began coiled up
like a man in sickness or prayer,
he felt more wakeful or asleep. Or both.
The way he backed off from the keyboard,
holding his hands at arm's length,
they became such moody foster children,
what he longed to rescue from the damage
that he did. Still they continued
to surprise him, like a story that burns
its words to see by. On a good day
who wouldn't open a vein to chance?
And what is breathing if not a dialogue
between the living and the dead?
Take the corpus of music he left.
Every day hundreds walk through it
the way air walks to the furthest cell
and back. It's what the blood expects.
Somewhere a woman shudders like a moth
on fire, lifts her body from its flame
to lie there, winded, flushed in the dark,
and his music turns its thin black wheel
against her past, vanishing as it goes.
Someone asked him once why the habit
of rocking his fingers on the keys
at the ends of phrases, as if he could milk
the sound that way, keeping it alive.
The difference for him was how
it changed the notes before that note,
like a coffin wavering over the grave,
sliding down through the life before it.
Which is how I think of his left hand,
the way it slipped into tiny cracks
in time, wanting in. Shadow lettering,
he called it, this ghosting of the silent
beat, this body and its hollows, pulsing.