“What is music? You finish making a note, and that’s it. Where is it?”

—David Harrington, Kronos Quartet, A Thousand Thoughts

I.

Waiting for the music

of the somewhere-after,

we all turn to magnetic dust, 

pieces of what we once were

clinging to this world 

like a drunk holds 

onto a bad idea,

the way a lost Midtown soul

stands outside boomtown bars,

decrypts messages coded 

in the chord changes 

of cover songs, 

how a son puts his ear 

to cold granite and listens

for the wind to cut 

across a field of real estate 

six feet down,

the way a widow leans in

to hear the whisper spin 

of two reels, 

one speaker, 

the static score 

from a Tokyo club, 1967.

Tube-strangled guitars, 

thumbtack snare, floor-shaking bass

—all too much for a plastic box

and its toy microphone. 

A soldier’s capstan-driven voice

bleeds into the distorted din 

of a bar serving R & R six hours 

from a listening post outside Saigon, 

where he’ll bleed again

soon enough. 

v.

Listening for echoes

of ghosts, I stumble  

through God’s afterthought

and lose myself 

in the bellows breath 

of a mellotron.

Harpsichord turnarounds 

distract me with the jangly promise 

of another tomorrow.

I hear messages 

in the chord changes 

of fallen FM radio angels.

A melody I can’t name travels with me 

thousands of miles and seven years 

from Quảng Ngãi to Sylvan Park

where my brain hums 

like a crystal glass 

under a violin bow, 

the rim vibrating 

the same frequency 

my father’s hand trembled

as he composed sweat-soaked

dispatches to my mother.

“How’s Lobo. He’s a pretty good dog.”

“Pat, please drive safely.”

I hold a browning 

par avion envelope

to my ear:

no tone

no inflection

no breath

IV.

I wait for an epitaph 

etched in oxide, sealed 

against a substrate of hope,

the coda to my expectation song.

I wait for the return:

one reel, unwound

and lost from a firebox

of relics with no voice,

untethered and spinning

between memory and time,

who offer instead

a pagoda,

a prayer bell,

and an address book

to guide my father’s soul

back home.