Music from a Farther Room

The flute, the sackbut, the dulcimerin the rooms of the dying. The harp,the cornet, the psaltery. The look

of the eyes’ last seeing when the earshear their final note or chord. The flatssome know as sharps. A bee batting a screen.

Thales of Crete appeased the wrathof Apollo with paeans to end a plague,and in all of Sparta’s rooms,

close with death, that conclusive music.But meadowlarks, too. Finches. Thrushesin the distant woods. Birds which are

themselves flutes, sackbuts, dulcimersdressed in feathers. Up in AmherstEmily’s last breath of the bobolink’s

virtuosic bubbling. A mother’s cooing,half weeping, half exalted send-offheard beyond a locked door. Anywhere

and often. In Pittsburgh the shrill whistleof the steel mill; how many have riddenthat held note into infinity? In Treblinka

the shrill whistling trains, the chuff,the cough, the high-note wail.On the Oregon Trail the pioneer’s wheel.

The ship’s whistle for the immigrantwhose filmed eyes never did see Ellis Island.The fading brain takes what it’s offered.

My mother’s mother, no instrumentbut the clock ticking, the ice clinkingits melt in a bedside tumbler.

O, don’t we each have our deaths setto music? Natural or manmade. The tabla,the tabor, the steam calliope.

Mozart’s “Moonlight Sonata” playingtinny through headphones stuckin someone else’s busy ears. C# minor.

What do we hear there at the edge,the threshold, the dark verge,when sense, no more than a warm room,

echoes emptily? How must the bedsidecello sound, how the car horn, howthe human voice hushing us at the last.

If not so much the tension of the songresolved, at least let it be the forceof the crossing when the humming ceases.