Abide

Epistrophy

5 Epistrophy The sleeve sighs from the jacket, the record from the sleeve. The needle takes its breath. I know what’s next— the horns, the hymns that spiral back to silence after the room fills with the sound of another room, the sound of steel as it fills the groove. Tonight it’s Monk’s Music, a record that begins in evening and then turns back to twilight. It pleads, “Abide with Me,” and then demurs, “Well, You Needn’t,” as dark rewinds. Halfway back to “Crepuscule,” it stops to ask for another hand, and I have to rise to turn the record as the room remembers the room it used to be. I have to raise the needle I couldn’t touch, once too delicate for my hand, needle that had to wait 6 for my father’s. He’d stand some nights in silence, smoke his only word, then reach and take the arm. Or he’d stand and take a breath— sigh of the sleeve in the jacket— cough the door and be gone. Like those movies, like those nightclub films where Monk stands from the piano, turns his quiet waltz, then walks off the stand, twenty, thirty minutes gone, the sidemen keeping time while he works the night shift at the furnace, I have to wait for morning or evening again to hear the other side, Monk has to stay in his child-red wagon, while the stars spin through the pines. Now, I turn the music back, turn it over, as light eases back into the sky. Dad wakes the blanket, the amp, the smell of solder, smell of oil instead of iron, twilight 7 instead of twilight. Then the room is young again, the smoke, the silence, the stars, years away, until dusk raises its hands from the keys. Then the needle gasps, and I stand. I reach, his hand on mine, and breathe again. ...