Awake in this slumbering house. My night light’s out, but it’s moon time. She moves so slow in the sky, even I could match her pace. Through the window, she floats in the deepest, darkest blue. I try to fix her in my sight, but my weak eyes let her go.
What am I doing standing here? It will take me a while to remember.
Turn back to the room that holds you.
What is it now? Middle of the night? Could be. Night of middles, round and thin. Night of doorways, standing here holding on to this solid frame, to keep mine from falling.
Right here, right now, at the doorway to hell.
Only joking.
It’s where they told me I’d go when I was young. Did I listen? Not at all. Nothing stuck. I forgot their threat. Buried it in the background.
“We’ll stick it to you,” they said. The words landed somewhere, but not where I listened. Instead, I waited for someone to hold my face in their hands, to tell me: “Remember what our music is, Magda.”
Now, I try to find this music and drink it in like water.
They say all you need in this life is breath and love. Or is it bread and roses?
And when your time here is up, there’s barely a rehearsal, so small a pause, a breath, right at the entrance to the stage, to reckon with your spirit before you walk on and let it rip.
This is how it is, the oldest woman in me imagines: you walk on, see the faces, a few of them familiar. You see the bright lights and that’s it. You’re gone. No first note, no sound. As you open your mouth, your spirit leaves. There it goes, rising higher, over the audience, above their hands—if by chance they raise them up to try and touch it. Try to hold on.
Quiet friend who has come so far,
I imagine, but I can’t say if it will be that way for me at the end. When I slip away, will it be sudden and swift? Will there be someone to hold me in their arms as I go?
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
They say that you might have to climb to get to heaven, but to get to hell, you just walk right in. I’ll tell you what: no one’s going to see me climbing any steps to heaven, that’s for certain. Not with these hips and knees. They’re like the rusted gears of a bicycle left out in the rain. Sticking, clicking, hurting.
No, I’ll just go straight in, and keep going down the block.
You never know what a corner will turn around for you. Sometimes, it’s a stranger who waits for your company, collar up, cap low, cigarette still aglow, feet so tired and used to running for escape when the need arises. They won’t meet you until you notice them first. They’ll wait and see. Take their time.
I was always one to notice, because—because that’s what I was like.
Did a friend tell me so? More than once?
In the kindest way, sure.
“Do you mean I was generous with my attentions?” I finally asked her. “That I was giving?”
“Well, you are that too.”
Tell me what I am tonight.
Sometimes the corner you round, on the street or in your mind, will turn you a terror, and you’re so sick in your speed you may not notice the terror is catching up.
No.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell.
No. I’ll turn away if I can manage it. Take this slow slide-step forward and away. See? It’s the looking back that makes me lost again.
Oh, these aching hips, these knees that every day seem to argue back harder.
This body is an oyster and my life is a shell. I fear I will be pulled out in the end, unwilling. Torn from my casing. I will feel every bit of the letting go. Tearing. I will be alive to the swallowing, and the pain of the end will ruin me.
Or will I be slurped into the last of all mouths, gently, tenderly? A tasty morsel, a bit of flesh. A reminder of real desire as I go. The ocean, my original bed.
For now, I’ll be the old woman who uses the door frame as her walking stick. Leaning on it while the bell tolls. While I toll it. Age hasn’t stolen much of my hearing, though it’s managed to nibble away at the full range of my voice. With a blessing, they say, comes a curse. I’ve always known that.
There’s a trick to it, I used to believe.
Find the blessing that’s worth it. Then run like hell from the curse.
I know this sound. It shudders the air around me. Ringing, ringing. Louder than before. But let me be the bell. Quiet friend, let me be the bell.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,
what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
Who wrote that?
Which poet was the first who found those words as beautiful as love inside his mind?
Of course, I forget. Only I know they are not mine. That peace and its great beauty are not yet mine to speak.
They say the entrance to the stage is always open if you know how to find it. This is my last stage, but I’m not ready for an encore. No, not prepared to be left alone out here, solo until the end, left out in the downpour, waiting for time to wash itself over me, only to find I’m all dried out.
What have all my acts amounted to?
Small and forgotten, most of them, and so early on, too late to go back and rearrange enough of my choices to erase the mistakes. If I had the chance to do so? Honestly, about half—well—at least a third of my past would vanish.
Here’s the thing: I have always chosen to put down my defenses when faced with the kind of attention I wanted. Yes, you could call that a fault, but it’s also required for the stage; it’s one part of the work of seduction. I learned this when I was a singer and a tambourine player. The crowd waits for you to notice them, and only then do you start to give them what they want, reveal yourself to their attention. The choices of rhythm and speed for this revelation are mostly yours, until they’re not—but it’s the transaction of desire the crowd is really looking for, and what they want to believe is the end result, the payoff, every night.
They want what they think is your heart, but only if you make them believe they can know what it contains.
This became instinctive to me over time—an instinct grown out of habit more than intention, though I will admit it was first born of passion. But no one could own me. That was what I promised myself every night, on and off the stage. I was my own keeper, my own maker, and it would always be that way.
Life has its own current, though. No matter your will, there’s the rush and the undertow. The truth is that I’m not a swimmer. If I learned how to stay afloat, it was only because I knew what drowning felt like.
Let me remind you I’m still very much alive tonight, in the liquid of the moonshine, bathing in what is made rich by the sinking of one lucky penny. Up to my neck in a little reflecting pool of night wishes only. The depths turn to shallows, and the shallows turn to shadows. Will I come ashore, washed up?
Where am I?
A little room of my own where at least I can close the door. I can’t afford to live on my own now, so I’ve moved in with my great-nephew. A rug on the floor, books on the shelves, a radio I can sing along to. My window looks out on a street that rattles with traffic once or twice during the day and folds in on itself at night when I draw the curtains closed—it’s not my type of street, too still, but it passes the day to watch it. Surrounding me in this semi-detached brick house is his young family.
My great-nephew teaches at a university, never knowing if his job—like the one I had at the munitions factory during the war—will be there from fall to winter to spring. He got me a book of poetry from the university, reads it to me now that my eyes are almost all out of vision. He thinks the fine-tuned words will give me comfort, thinks I still feel enough to need it.
Which is true, if feeling is the mind’s last song. I do sing it. The brain’s a precious thing. Floating in its juices in the skull, not so unlike the oyster in the shell.
I’m surprised and grateful that he engages my mind, by which I mean he understands I still have my own will. I think he’s curious what I might do next.
What was the poet, and who was the book? It travels to me across time and space, the sound of the poet’s words takes me turning round and round, until my feet leave the ground. I float. I close my eyes—there’s no need to look. I go. No, not up any stairs to heaven. Instead, the words take me to the stranger on the corner and the touch of their hand. The words are the witnesses to my confessions.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.
In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.
I think I know well what it is to turn myself to wine, to not let myself drown, or at least to drown differently. But who else am I in the mystery and in the meaning?
Don’t make me go out on the stage yet. Let me hover here for now. I’m not ready, and finally I’m old enough, almost eighty years, to know it.
Well, listen—
I won’t go out there unless I can bring the band with me, for one last sheltering storm of sound. The dancers are waiting, just beyond the circle of light where I stand, with their eyes on me. Florence is there, her fingers to the mandolin strings. I haven’t thought of her in ages. She and the other musicians, they watch me for a sign. My inhalation, enough for the first note to pitch and lift its song, my right foot raised, they wait for my toe to touch the floor, the tambourine to come down. The first beat of my final encore.
My untidy bed unmade yet again. Look what’s in it. All the undoing, every wave in my original bed, coming to break against the shore.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
I steady myself in front of the closet’s full-length mirror and try to fix my eyes on the old woman I see in reflection. She wavers for a minute under my gaze.
I’ve made it this far, out of the doorway and into the closet. Ha!
On a hanger inside is a men’s suit.
I reach up heavily, my arms and shoulders moving under water, and manage to get it off the hanger, to hold it up and recall how it felt when I had it on.
In the mirror, I blink back, growing indecipherable.
The suit is longer than me, long to the floor, the ankle cuffs drag more than they used to. I’m an old woman whose world has grown several inches taller. Now, great-nephew can lean over and kiss the top of my head as he says goodnight.
“Good night, Magda. We can read again tomorrow.”
“Good night, my son.” Oh, but that was a slip of the heart, or the mind, or the tongue.
He doesn’t seem bothered, but then, I can’t quite make out his face in the lamplight.
“Sleep well, Auntie.”
“I wish you every dream.”
Was that only earlier this evening? Or else I’m plummeting backwards. Gravity sees there’s a job for me to do down below. As if this body hasn’t done enough labour, in war and in love. I’m sunk by gravity, the pressing mask of night seeks to flatten me. It takes me lower to the ground. How will I breathe when I get there?
But see how it is. I can still notice the world around me, yes, the faces in the crowd. I’m open to distraction, and this is what leads me to pause. To notice. To meet their eyes.
I can’t deny that it has led to the wreckage I built. And the shelters I’ve found.
Down there, spread against the earth, I’d begin to admire the edges of the blades of grass as if they were the young scaffolding of an emerald-green cathedral. Life. One of the great hues of the planet. One I’ve never seen this close before. Not these blades of grass in particular, and not any cathedral—well, in pictures, but not in person, because the church threw me from its holy halls as soon as it saw my fatal flaw.
The error at the heart of me. That exquisite error that changed my life. Its invitation, which was, simply, to live.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.
In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.
What time is it? Who will keep it?
The musicians raise their hands to the instruments. Florence is there and she waits with pleasure, with mine in her hands.
She is that perpetual first real lover.
But stop.
Maybe I’ll seek another face I can recognize, in the crowd gathered here to watch.
Quiet friend who has come so far,
No, there’s no one else tonight.
So, who will find me in this dimming mirror?
Squinting as though this will help me to see, I slide my wrinkled hand with its curvature of blue veins along the collar and the sleeves of the suit, first the left one, then the right. I touch each button and the dark leather belt of the pants. The buckle, grown dull, still carries its own weight—no rust yet that I can see. I pull the zipper up and then down. My hands shake despite me. I move them across the fabric to feel how threadbare and worn it is in places, but still complete.
Did the suit belong to me? I had more than a few sets of men’s outfits, both suits and factory clothes.
If I’m honest, I was always taking them off to climb into someone’s arms.
When I look back to my reflection in the mirror, I can almost see a lover standing beside me, the glow of the lamp glinting in their eyes.
I blink and we drift out of focus. I blink again and I can’t see them there at all.
Who do I have left to hear my confessions?
When I was young, what I longed for most was to be able to make my own choices, to be someone of my own making. Keeper of myself.
The Second World War came, I was twenty-one, and like many girls tied up in uptight Hogtown, biding their time, I began to work. While the war raged, no man would marry me, which meant I had no reason to start a family. Factory work, the war effort: that was the new path a girl could clear through her wilderness when she left home.
I wonder, though, if I would still be alone had I had babies to mother. Would they be here now to keep me company, keep me tethered longer to my life? Would they be my anchor?
A selfish wish perhaps, an unanswerable question—the kind I’m good at asking. I’d raise a glass to it, every time.
If not for Florence, how would I have known myself? I learned from her, before she let me go. A lover teaches you to understand the limits of yourself, and how to lose them. Both the limits and the lover. I could drink to that truth too.
But enough of drowning in spirits.
Florence was the first girl who tried to call me home. We met at the factory, where we fell into step and pull and lift with each other as machinists on the assembly line. I can picture her now, in her last-ditch tight coat and worn-down boots. Bold and honey-eyed.
We tossed ourselves away in relief at the end of each day, long after dark, when the streets cleared out. Usually, we headed to the basement of the Silver Lounge, crowded with girls, or to the Rideau, which is where she first kissed me, leaning up against the wall in that smoke-and-laughter-filled room, for what seemed like several glorious hours. Later, in the warmer months, we’d leave the bars for the park. Allan Gardens was a big sprawling patch of green, and we went there for cover, though it was never safe enough to stay for long.
Rolling in the leaves at night. Her mouth above mine. Her hair brushing my face like a filament of stars. I let her break me down, and I buried my fears beneath her, filling her with new hunger, almost too quickly, because we had no cover. We both acted like thieves, the way we took from each other, thinking we had found a home.
Florence was the girl who opened me up to the night. I loved the music she made on street corners, turning tunes to passersby, or sitting on the old bed in her small rented room, playing songs for me to sing with a voice that did not know its limits.
What can I hear? It’s like a melody in the night air. There it is again. The sound of a mandolin. Florence’s music. Or is this a dream to me too?
I’m used to the night. Sleep hasn’t come easily for a long time. Was I dreaming, just a minute ago, of standing there in front of the mirror at the closet door? Or, did I find my way back to bed, only to wake again? I can’t recall.
I lie here on my back in the dark while shapes and shadows float past my eyes, as if I’m a diver looking up at the surface. There’s a little pale light coming from the window, and I can’t tell if it’s from a streetlight or the moon.
Listen, the music is louder than before. Her melody strains.
In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.
I tried on a men’s suit and jacket for the first time when I was twenty-four.
We’d started a band. I was the one singer so far and we needed to find another, an alto, for harmonies. Florence thought a lot of me, but she knew my voice had its limitations, so she sought another voice to complement mine, to really make it sing.
The suits would be our stage look, she said, and we could wear them offstage too. I put one on, and it just felt right. The suit of my desires. I walked the length of Florence’s rented room in it. She told me the clothes were castoffs, but didn’t tell me how they’d come to her. Wearing it, I moved with a feeling of buoyancy and endurance—what they now call confidence—as if I could swim a long distance, as if I could dare to make it from one far shore to another.
Florence sat on her cot in the corner, watching me. I can still picture her distinctly, leaning back, relaxed and intent, her hand poised with its cigarette over an ashtray that rested on a pile of musical scores. She wrote that music, as I recall. It was her freedom in the floating world.
“I’ll get more suits,” Florence said abruptly, as was her way. But I knew well enough by then that she would’ve given me the clothes off her back.
“This is the only one you have?” I asked.
“Go on then, take it. Just be careful when you wear it. Especially out on the street.”
I could not refuse her gift.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,
what batters you becomes your strength.
I’ll ask for a truth now, because I’m alone.
Why couldn’t Florence have stayed with me a little longer?
The war gave us no centre to hold onto; it spun us out. We were still young, everything had happened so fast, and we were working, making our own money. How were we supposed to settle with so little time to do so?
On top of that, we were made to feel wrong for who we were. It often felt like our own flaws were all we had to live for.
But listen to me now: I was my own keeper. I was trying to be my own maker.
It was like crossing a bridge over the flow of life—that river that threatens to rise in its terrors and wonders.
Toward the end of the war, our world crumbled. The jobs disappeared, the police cracked down on us; our music rose and then faded. The men who had fought were slowly returning, or not returning, lives gone and other lives broken. Their victory a small flag in the midst of the destruction and desecration that war brings.
Three of my brothers had left to fight, and only one came home. His son was born two years later, and that son had a son, my great-nephew. The only one in my family I’ve grown close to. Maybe the only one who cares.
Life can move so suddenly. The river rises, floods the bridge.
What remains is all I’m left with now.
But I haven’t lived this long to be wrecked by what has already been done.
And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.
It was at the Silver Lounge that Florence introduced me to Hannah, another singer. Hannah had a range deeper than mine, richer and more open, an alto for sure. No interest in a tambourine, though—I’d have to play that one alone.
Hannah told us she was new in town and looking for a place to work. She’d sung with a travelling band for a while. When they passed through Hogtown she decided to stay, to see whether she could make a life for herself underground in this dirty, conservative town. She’d lost her own little brother in the fighting overseas and was carrying that grief on her back. Struggled with how heavy it was to bear.
What I remember most is the flicker of recognition in her solitary eyes. She looked at Florence closely that first night, but not in a searching way, not seeking to know what was in her heart. It was more like she was open to waiting.
I liked the lines that carved her out. Weary lines, but full of decision, as though she’d chosen to come so far just to be herself.
Something in me understood why Florence might’ve longed to go with her.
Florence was doing all the talking, sharp and swift. “So we’ll have a practice next weekend, at eight back here before the bar opens.” She then went silent for a minute, probably thinking about how to arrange it.
Hannah looked over to me, then back to Florence.
There was something about Hannah that night that was utterly new to me. I could tell she was distracted, but the attention she rested on each of us felt both gentle and full, and also like something I couldn’t hold.
Thinking back now, I’d say it felt like she was witnessing us, and wasn’t asking for much more than that.
I noticed too that Florence’s eyes kept failing to not meet Hannah’s. I knew what it was to fall into someone’s eyes, to weave an alibi full of holes to cover up desire. So I shot Florence a look that said, I’m watching.
But then Florence touched my shoulder once, twice. A tender gesture that caught me by surprise, as we were rarely light of touch with each other. She said my name before she wheeled away. Was she calling to me, asking that I follow?
I wished Hannah good night with a stage smile and turned to go.
“You’re always looking,” I said to Florence when I caught up to her. “Looking for whatever you want.”
Well, maybe that was true. When we met, I was the only one who caught her eye. But I must’ve known, even then, she had a glance that didn’t rest for long and yet so often seemed like it was ready to be found.
I wanted her to convince me I could count on her, but she didn’t. The words escaped her.
But you are mine. That’s what I wanted to hear. We had been fighting plenty, almost to the brink, and I’d begun wondering if she would leave me.
It just made me fiercer.
“I bet on nothing,” I leaned in, my voice low and hard with what I knew to be my own hurt. “But I took a chance with you.”
“Don’t you know the difference between lust and something deeper?”
“No words,” I told her. “There are no words for this. What you’re doing.”
She was getting ready to walk out on me, then and there. I knew it. But I also hoped that she expected me to follow.
Was that love?
I wanted to think I was still the chance she would take. I waited for her to speak but she didn’t seem to have an answer.
I recalled the crowd we’d played for that night. All the strangers’ faces. I thought of Florence on stage with me, her profile. I’d tried to hold our melodies well and stay focused, though in one of the songs, I’d begun a wrong verse, the last one, and I had to hastily skip back to the middle of the song. Florence shook her head when it happened, but kept the rise of the chords steady into the chorus. There was some whistling from the audience and laughter. Usually, I appreciated a lively response from the crowd, the way they pulled and hollered at the songs with happiness and abandon, but tonight it troubled me.
Had Florence really been in love with me?
Now, looking back, she seems so young.
We were still standing there, staring at each other, when the front doors burst open and the bar raid began. How many nights had an intrusion like this happened? Too many to count.
In the space of a breath, Florence spun around and headed for the back exit, her mandolin in its case held aloft like a treasure in her arms. She went without waiting for me, never even seemed to hesitate.
Shocked, I didn’t think to run right away. Not until an officer grabbed me from behind. Desperately, I bit down hard through the skin of the hand on my shoulder, and when it released its grip, I threw myself toward the back of the club and darted away out the backdoor.
I was turned inside out with terror. But there’s power in fear, if you channel it through action. I couldn’t feel my feet hitting the pavement. The sirens sliced the air to pieces as we scattered away.
More than anything, I was worried the police were chasing me, that they were catching up and closing in. I’d been chased before. I ran until my legs hurt worse than the fear in my chest.
I could still feel where the officer had gripped my shoulder hard enough to bruise. I gulped in the fresh air, and silently spoke a desperate wish to not be seen—pretending at invisibility, the way you do when you feel hunted, even if you’re already down the street and around the corner. Begging at fate to make what scares you disappear.
The summer we met, after the first time we’d escaped a police raid, Florence had said, “They can’t steal us from ourselves. We’re both still alive. We’re together. So breathe. Come back to yourself.” That was the moment I began to fall for her. But she hadn’t said it especially for me. That was just how Florence lived.
As I slowed down, I became more aware of my surroundings, those familiar streets of escape. I didn’t want to go home, so instead I went to Allan Gardens, to the place Florence had taken me after that first raid, and those many other nights that followed. Lone figures stood here and there in the park. Some leaned against the tree trunks as if expecting an eventual train, in no hurry, lost in their own thoughts and feelings. Their faces were mostly hidden to me behind branches and leaves, but I knew they watched me pass, then turned the other way, their stolen glances either consoling or indifferent.
I told myself I was not afraid. I was used to being the outsider, the shadow eater, the night walker.
As I stepped along the path, I remembered how Florence and I had sat on the grass side by side, the June moon low and all over us in its solitary poses. I remembered wondering what she saw, what she thought of me that first night: the limits of my life so far, all that I hadn’t yet seen and done and known. Would she somehow come to understand me as the police did, see me painted over with the same names that they had for me, as something ugly or sick, as less than human?
There are strange, panicked tricks our minds play when we’re faced with the question of love. We search out any alibi. We tie ourselves in knots.
I thought then that if I was going to say something to her, I had to share some shameful truth about me. I had to confess to her the truth of what others thought of me.
Perhaps it was also that I had a taste for the dramatic, and I wanted her to listen to it.
But Florence shook her head. She didn’t want to hear my past regrets and my fears in that moment.
So instead I asked her, “What can I give you?”
She looked up past the branches to the sky, the moon splashing its light everywhere, the dampness of the night air filling her mouth, her throat, her lungs, as she breathed it in slow.
“What doesn’t hurt so much,” she said.
Then she turned and looked me all over. I tried to meet her eyes. I don’t know what she saw there, but she smiled unconcerned, with a trace of reassurance. “Whatever you’d like,” she added.
She turned away again to her own thoughts. A private grin on her lips. There was always a bit of a trickster about Florence, a lust for survival.
That first night, I’d wished time could slow as I brought her pleasure instead of pain, that she would be no thief with me, that what I gave her wasn’t stolen. I’d wanted her to let me take her in. I’d looked for hope in Florence’s eyes, a balm for the feeling of my own shame. I’d searched for a way to soothe my mind.
A stirring in the trees nearby startled me from my memories. I needed to keep moving.
There was no moon to be seen in the sky above, just a dusting of old stars beyond the city’s young, encumbering blaze of electric light.
I imagined Florence beside me. I thought of how she’d played at the bar: louder, harder, more jubilant in her sound than the rest of the band combined. She played as if she could sense another raid was coming, and that they would try to shut the place down for good.
I tried to believe that if I looked for Florence, I could find her again.
Has love been the breathing I have taken for this life? Like most of us, I’ve done so, deeply. But only a few times. In this, we do not have a choice.
Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
In the noise of their world, where do I go?
Sometimes great-nephew’s children come in to visit. I try to sing for them, old Auntie Magda singing her ghostly tunes. The littlest one gets up to dance to the melody on feet she just learned to walk with, moving back and forth like she can feel the rhythm that was there with us on stage all those years ago. They laugh, the children in my room. I do love to hear their laughter.
Their mother, I remembered her name earlier. She visits here, this tiny island of a room, to take the children back so I can rest, scoops the littlest one up. Short haired, soft framed, and I confuse her with my own mother for a minute.
My mother told me once that I was born waving my fists, a fighter.
“Like almost every child,” I replied, stubborn.
“No, you were born a mad one. That was you.”
Mama, they were fists of joy.
If she were here now, I would go to her.
Tell me again where I am in this night of middles, this life I see drifting by. The earliest time curves back to me. The older memories are so strong. The first melody Florence ever taught me. I can still feel what it was like to sing its song.
“I’ll sing again for you soon,” I tell the children.
Their mother waves.
Goodbye, sweet ones.
I look outside my door as it closes.
That’s life happening there, Magda. Life unfolding around you. The loudest kind of life. Their noise never stops. It rushes by. But at least you can still hear it happening.
At least for now, they seem to hear you.
And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.
Lately, my surroundings have begun to fall away, their definitions softening. This is something I can’t refuse, no matter how I try. I find less and less to hold onto. My strong prescription glasses don’t change the fact that I’m losing my vision. It is dispersing—the way dreams go, travelling out of reach, out of orbit.
Tell me where I am tonight.
Sitting up in this unmade bed. Hips aching, I gently swing my legs to the floor, then gradually lift myself to my feet. Each step is slow and deliberate as I move toward the door.
What am I doing here?
There’s a draft in this space. It shivers me—though isn’t it spring yet? My favourite time of year. Shouldn’t the night be mild?
And what about my thoughts?
If it’s true what great-nephew says, that I have seen a lot, why should I be surprised at the visions coming now? Why should I refuse the encore if the crowd wants me back? If Florence is waiting, ready to play, fingers suspended?
Halfway down the hall, the floor moves like a footbridge, shaking with my frail-boned weight to throw me over. Each of us takes ourselves down in the end.
But I still have a wall to help keep balance as I shuffle, sliding each foot along it. These hips and knees—no touch can soothe now.
After a few more steps, I’m standing again in front of the full-length closet at the end of the hallway. I’m pulling at the closet door—it only needs a gentle tug to open. Was I just here before? Just a few minutes ago? It’s hard to recall.
Shall I go back? To a new beginning?
In the stillness of the night, the creaking of my footsteps on the wooden floorboards announces my returning existence. Is it walking if you move as slow as the moon floating in the sky?
I rub my eyes, leaning against the wall to hold myself upright, swaying unsteadily for a minute, expecting brightness. Of what? An afternoon sun? But it’s only the dimness of the hallway that I find instead, and down the hall my bedroom with its window.
Turn back to the room that holds you.
Let me open up the window here to find a little last air before I wake. Where’s the latch? The window holds the moon, or is it a streetlight? Or the sun rising? I’m not sure which.
I can see the pale light wavering on the floor in rhythm with another idle dream. For a minute it fades, and then comes back into focus. I blow it a silent kiss, all that is left for me to give.
What else will know me here, besides the light? Is it song?
Look what I’ve forgotten.
I’ll get my old suit of desires from the closet. Lift it from the hanger to put it on. A humble suit but it served me well. I’m ready for the stage now, to sing again for you. Please, quiet friend, hum a little music as I go, to bring me into tune. As I stand here bent and breathing. Just breathing.
Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,
what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.
In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.
And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.
“Sonnets to Orpheus, Part Two, XXIX”
Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy