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Mesto

Weeping quarter notes,
he feels himself emptying out.
He closes the book, one page a dizzying array of musical notes,
and the other a picture of a room
with a vaulted ceiling,
swathed in gold--reminiscent of Louis XL.
This was his first published work:
sighing with a long baritone "c" note,
he slides it back onto the shelf.
Now his eyes rest
on the framed photograph of Emily,
the wife he'd first beheld
examining his books in a library,
exclaiming "beautiful"
as she turned the pages
in lonely times such as these.
Today the sadness began
after Emily honked her car horn at him
to retrieve something from the back seat as she was pulling out of the driveway.
He came running
then asked her to beep the horn again--
an "e" instead of an "a."
He asked her to step out while he fixed it, but she protested,
insisting she had to work, meetings,
things he didn't understand.
He told her there was no reason to say so
in forte; piano would do just fine.
The notes inegales
of her heels against the concrete,
and later, of the shattering glass in the lamp he'd bought her, the same one
that was in his book, will be the inspiration for his next work.
And whenever she hears him
laboring on it, she will slam the door on him, a final cymbal crash
at the end of a long recital.
Now, slipping into a reverie,
he remembers the days
when he'd sit in his father's house, leaning on the window ledge.
He longs for those afternoons when it rained,
and tall trees played for him--soft running rhythms, and at times, percussive thunders until the concluding winds slipped through limbs like flue music.
He remembers the last time
he'd laughed at his father,
saxophone-finger-play tones rising
from his open mouth
as his father tap-danced
on his mother's kitchen floors.
Sometimes she'd join in,
her silverware adding accents
to complement its fever.
But here he is brought back to the present, by Emily's approaching steps,
and the quasi-morocco stutter of Advil capsules tumbling out
of the ubiquitous bottle.
He catches the sixteenth-not-peals
of her cries
as the house decrescendos
into silence.