i like telling lies! like this one: you've been trying to teach me how to love you. given the time for rote memorization, i can reproduce all the trappings of skill, but imagine plucking a weed -- no, imagine tearing it out, firm grip right at the base of the stem, roots wrenched free with an earthy rip -- and discovering there's nothing underneath. you'd be left standing there with nothing to hold, alone amid a crowd of tulips. what a betrayal! these things must be done right. or else they must be mimicked so perfectly not even i could tell. and i can tell. i know the feeling of music on my fingers like gold rings. i know how the light holds itself still in the clerestory when i play. i know the inside of a piano is both more and less hollow than you think it is, and i could unstring its lovely tendons until it is a firewood corpse for you and only you. but melody and i are no dear friends. i know nothing of how a touch makes a clarion sound. the young women who wanted to see my hands on the keys: they couldn't tell the difference when i played. if they asked how i did it, i could describe the silver flash of an oar, the fervid dances only dreaming men conjure, the wild and looping slides of bright birds in the prime of their courtship days. fool them. in truth, i never found out what music i made for them. but you are the preeminent expert in loving you, and even if i were good, even if i were perfect, i would not attain half your fluency. my hands get cold when i step up to the stage; did you know that? circulation troubles. you have been walking with me, patiently, and here and again telling me, now harmonize. but best beloved, i have been cored, perhaps was born so. the absence of me from all things is total; even the echoes in the rafters won't speak my name. given my dissolution, the dissolution that has been an undertaking continued since the beginning of my time, how do i carry anything for you, much less what i must? a tune, a bucket, a flower stolen from your own garden and returned to you? how do i tell you i'll never learn? how do i tell you i am singing, and it is making all the old wood rattle and creak, and i see and think and hear and feel and am nothing, save for you standing there before me with the glow of the sun in your hands?
theartofmadeline
yousharknotpass
