I keep listening
to the allegro, the third movement of Mozart’s piano concerto in E-flat
on endless repeat
through scattered rain squalls, windshield wipers like metronomes,
while driving back
to my mother’s house after a visit with my father in the nursing
home. The piano slows
to a few notes dripping from a faucet someone’s forgotten to turn off,
and I’m in a different tempo,
time, and key. The woodwinds take up a somber-timbred theme
in A-flat major,
three-quarter time. Now the piano’s notes are
lemon, vermilion, ocher—
autumn leaves falling from a grove of sugar maples into accumulating
silence. The tempo
is andantino cantabile, meaning “a little faster than moderately
slow, flowingly
and in a singing style.” I stop to pump gas
at a Mobil station,
an old-fashioned one which still has a red-winged horse
flying across
a blue stucco wall as its logo. It’s “full serve.”
A man with Mike
stitched in white across his gray work shirt’s left breast pocket
ambles over
to “fill her up.” Through the rolled-down window my nostrils flare
with the thin, intoxicating
smell of spilled gasoline. Mike (though he could be Joe or Jim for all
I know and just wearing
Mike’s soiled shirt) suddenly stops pumping and points
at the sky. I
hop out. Cars are swerving off the highway onto the shoulder. The sun
has broken through. Couples,
single drivers, whole bickering families of six to eight kids
spill out
of their cars, station wagons, or minivans like some circus act.
Everyone is looking up and pointing.
“Never seen anything like it in my entire life!” says Mike (or Jim or Joe).
“Wow, it really is
in Technicolor, just like on the Disney Channel,” observes one precocious
six-year-old.
The mother of all rainbows arcs from horizon to
horizon, connecting
the humpbacked, watermelon mountains to our near
valley. It arcs
in chords of color, six clear notes, three-quarters of an ascending
diatonic scale,
A-flat major. Purple shading into blue, then green,
re mi fa,
yellow going up the staff from orange into red, so la ti.
No, it’s a full
spectrum’s octave with sky-blue do’s on either side
for high and low
notes, heaven’s tonics. Part of another rainbow,
only a shattered
thirty-degree arc, shadows the full rainbow, hovering over
its rim—like an imperfect echo—
from one to two o’clock. How is it that my one small impoverished life
contains, andantino cantabile,
these miles of rain, sun, such double rainbows, and the greasy rag
that Mike (it must be
Mike!) wipes his hands on after he’s finished pumping gas? It flutters
like a flag
from his left back pocket. I keep seeing the manacle-like bruises around
my father’s wrists,
where the orderlies have had to hold him down for his weekly shower.
The contused skin is umber,
yellow, mauve, and black. Around his wrists he wears dark rainbows
that hold him to the earth.