The Invention of the Kaleidoscope

Träumerei

 träumerei —like the afternoon with her spent listening to Horowitz roll his long fingers over the notes— listen, like this— as daylight swung through the trees and her son slept on and the blue dog leapt into its blue chair. As before I was sent home to mimic on piano what alone I wouldn’t perceive: chords shape-shifting within chords, their drunken, muddied bleed, then the crisp, clear song of the dreamer’s reverie—this one note—broken or turned sweetly inward, romance of self with self, awareness stirred to a plastic empathy. His hands, she said, spreading her own so wide the silk finger webs pearled, nearly twice the span of a normal man’s. Listen— as now the hardest chord is struck, two notes more than the octave, a reach most have to roll or flub to protect the joints’ weave, dazzle the initiate’s ear, float away even the record’s very spitting as she places the thorn-shaped needle back at the measure she wants me to hear—listen— smoothing down the square of sunlight I want to see pleated again on her gray dress— Later there would be Horowitz’s death to learn about 0 and then my own, discipline, assassinations, sex and geology, a love so often frustrated by lack of work. But then, listening, didn’t she close her eyes and dream, perhaps, of the book she’d never publish and the son who would never get well? While I, who have never wanted to be a musician, assumed the dream of a life no sorrow could touch, content to linger within that distance between us. Listen, she begins, how beautiful— as the long, foreign fingers, long dead, curl again over the impossible notes. ...