As though some profound force of repression were finally and collectively failing. As if I had forgotten I was ignoring the mango filament lodged between molar and incisor as I watched the movie starring monastic silence and slept, dreaming the long dead dash of the wharf rat along the kitchen floor, its slow rustle. As if your signature were a dictionary soaked in clover honey and the way your feet were painted meant every field of golden rye weren’t a season only. I stamp dancing in a vat of bees and stain my feet with pollen. If only analysis were kindness, then brilliant would mean never alone. Look at the stars, the Leonid shower, dry and cold here, but there, no, not by the Sound. We learn to behave as if revenants were not at a distance shouting. As though things were not more ordinary, each clock wasted if not broken in its watery glass. One grows tolerant of craving quiet. As if the trills of little envelope symbols in cell windows were not silencers, the vowels round as pills before their coming to the throat, first the note and then the not and no, the vowel rounds. And then the soily withdrawals. As though a potato didn’t fill my belly nor the fat make a pain in my side. Listen to the holiday whistling from the pulpit, what May means to apple pulp.

The music is not as I recall it, none of it. The equipment I replaced was the same, except for the letters of the name embossed into the cabinet of the sub bass system on the slabs. And yet. The umbrella from the opera was lost in the rain, the rain across which Isabelle Faust once again draws the partita of her bow, as though no one had noticed the words lying there in rows like strangers in hospital beds, their curtains drawn but the silver light from their phones visible through the curtains. None look at their curtains. A study conducted by no one concludes that the world isn’t the same. And who knows, everything may turn out that way. Seeking in it is like the music I can’t quite listen to because it sounds less and less like the way I remember it. Even now. I mean right now. Like there’s nothing between us here.