Piano in Knots

You know when you find the song, listening over and again because some knot in you came undone with the notes expanding, mapping the unravel, the denouement, the untying of the knot, and you let it do its work at the end of the day when all you can think is:  could I have done more?  Ah.

Song.  Song.  I need you to sing to me.  Your effort is enough.  I'm making peace from war.  

And you ask:  how you grew, how I loved you, how I found you surprised on a four-track cassette recorder I got for my 17th birthday, so I could hear the songs in wholeness and I turned it up loud enough I couldn't hear myself think through myself.

You were given love to love with.  You were given voice to sing, fingers on the keyboard stretching secret threads around the house when everyone had gone to the movies because you didn't want anyone to hear and when the house is empty, then go down basement stairs, the humid turning to chill and sit still on the bench and you know the notes by the ivory missing from the keys.  A visual player.

And thread binds heart and song works medicine in the kitchen when dinner plans are set aside for the place you found with your head resting between the corner cabinets so you can hear your voice and dream into the corn fields for something you've been missing to come down the road and pull in the drive and tell you how the song called the thread that led the question to you.

What is it you will do with this one wild and precious life?  You come back to this question, addicted to something good and terrified of what you are.

In class, we talk about the things we won't talk about and there is triumph in the speaking heart that jumps the gap to meet you there, holding hand and reaching:  the possibility that we can respond with generosity, even with ourselves, which we have a tendency to descend upon like a noose lowered around the horse thief, the one that stole your voice, that wild horse.