Inspired by Kronos Quartet, A Thousand Thoughts
“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.
