Unheard Music
-for David Foster Wallace
You did it from every angle, from sideways, front, and back, and
even from top to bottom. You were telling us this. The tang of your
words like a copper penny and the first bristling wind in October, when we
pull our warmest sweaters down, you were telling us. I remember hearing
about you in my husband’s study. He told me you were his age and I
remember thinking: too Young to die, and that’s too bad, but that was
before I knew you. Then I knew you, and I wanted to go back; to see the
double-lined repeat :|| and reverse the melody. I must also speak to the
Words that are a familiar lullaby, the in-between meter that
gave measure to my mind after I’d felt, for so long, as though my head
clanged in a sound booth playing only discordant noise. So many words,
David, but not enough to last my lifetime, or three, which is how many
lifetimes I’d want to absorb and intone the melody you began when your
mind was still chugging like the storybook train saying, I think I can…
then somewhere along your sound’s tracks, you said I can’t. Now
no one is here to hold that baton, to tap the podium in time. All that’s
left for us is your unheard music, the vestiges of a man who played the
linguistic harp. A protégé who became the maestro, whose aria brought me
awake one chilly morning and tried to tell me the truth about it. Now I’m listening David, and I want you to tell me more. But you —
you surrendered to that awful, dissonant finale. You left with only
reverberations. I’m alone in a chamber with
still-warm, still-and-unborn
echoes that guide me within my
darkest moonlit sonatas
into your unsung, unknown
secrets.
— J.A. Carter-Winward
This is Not a Song, but I am Singing: Poetry — COMING SOON
