let the last thing be song

 

i.

Memory is safest in someone with amnesia.

Behind locked doors

glow the unmarred pieces—

musical notes humming

in a jumble, only

waiting to be

arranged.

ii.

What is left in one

who does not remember?

Love and music.

Not a name but the fullness.

Not the sequence of events

but order of rhythm and pitch,

a piece of time in which to exist.

iii.

A tone traveling through space has no referent,

and yet we infer, and yet it

finds its way between our cells

and shakes us.

Aren’t we all still quivering

like tuning forks

with the shock of being,

the shock of being seen?

iv.

When I die, I want to be sung across the threshold.

Don’t you? Doesn’t the universe,

with its loosening warp

and weft, still

unspool its symphony?

Sing to me — please —

and I will sing for you as all unravels,

as time continues past the final beat

of the stutter inside your chest.

Harmonize, at the edge of that horizon,

with the black hole’s

fathomless B-flat.

~ Hannah Fries

with thanks to the marginalian