1. Music as a Brass Bell falling into the Sea

Before she left, you thought you’d understood music. But really you hadn’t. You learned this in Greece when you watched a giant brass bell plunge into the blue waters off Syros. You tethered your neck to it. Miltonic fragments bubbled out of your mouth. Perhaps you hallucinated. Who knows? Memory’s an eely thing. Shrill cries of the night hag, infant blood fresh on her nails, led you through a maze of rushes.

The bell struck sand. Pinned you there. The first five bars of Mozart’s Requiem parted the water’s lips. You thought, That’s what Mozart saw before he heard it. A bell striking a seabed.
You tasted its percussive echoes.
You thought then you’d understood music.
But really you hadn’t.
You’d just gotten a consolation prize.

#

In Syros, you struggled to separate your fantasy of Greece from the Greece around you. Pink dawns, laundry on balconies, and exhaust fumes wrestled with Styx, Lethe, coins on cold tongues.

Rosemary, tolling angeluses, and balmy nights rose up against mourning doves chattering in the lost tongues of the Pharaohs.

Confusion led to debasement.

You craved Greece’s approval, bandying badly-pronounced words at the shopkeepers, at the locals, at the black-clad priests—kalimera, eos, ouzo, even though you knew they loathed you. Another fucking tourist.
Money breeds cruel smiles.

#

One afternoon, you went down to the water with her, seaside café: white plastic chairs, wood tables, umbrellas advertising local beers. A queuing merry-go-round of Eurotrash. Stray cats twisted around her legs, curling into her lap. She drank a carafe of rosé, smoked hand-rolled cigarettes, and stroked their necks.

You took in her bow-shaped lips, flared nostrils. You thought, She thinks too fast, dreams so big. Always falling one step short of greatness. That’s her tragedy. It’s what makes her beautiful.

She looked past you at the blue water, at the laughing children, at the married men’s eyes unclothing the teenaged girls. Was that when she began planning her exit?

After she left without a goodbye, you thought about love, music, death. About how all you could do was echolocate yourself out of grief.
You stared at the impossible chlorophyll soaking the water blue until everything went dark.

2. Music as “The Mastery of the Thing”

You’d met in grad school. She was twenty years younger than you.
Sometimes she wore disco-era outfits, platforms, sequined handbags, and cat’s-eye sun glasses.
She said she liked something you wrote.
That’s how it started.

One night, you met at a bar in Greenpoint.
It was called Los Perdidos.
You’d never been to Brooklyn.

The bar was furnished with oak and teak from a Spanish galleon. It had foundered off the Cornish coast in the 1600s. You looked at the walls, at the nets and shells, and thought of that day when you’d visited your best friend’s grandfather’s house as a child, of the painting of Theseus’s ship in its wood-paneled dining room.

The grandfather had served prawns and avocado in conch bowls packed with ice. He caught you studying the painting. He told you the ship was called the Argo, even after all its original planks had been replaced.
“Wasn’t that strange?” he said.

Traces of coconut lingered in his aftershave. An opera played on a gramophone in another room. The soprano’s aria and pink shells turned into a watery sunset; the impossible green of the avocado, a parrot’s drowning squawk. Your hairs trilled, stood on end.

Later that night, you sleepwalked down the conch’s dank planks, drawn to the original sea’s music, to the parrot’s drowning screeches.

#

On your way home jets circled LaGuardia, weaving a bracelet around Orion’s ankle. An alleyway with gin and fish gone bad beckoned. Dutch cobblestones. Echoes of hooves and clogs. A shaft of moonlight stole your shadow.

A homeless man lunged out from a doorway, eyes cracked marbles. He slashed your hand with a boxcutter. Then pressed his hot tongue against your ear and whispered,
“The great tragedy of life isn’t dying, it’s experiencing consciousness asymmetrically.”

You feared you’d been wrestling a blind angel.
You gave him all your money.

#

His words cracked a hidden fault line. Got you spiraling back to that white room where you’d eaten pages from Othello, where you hadn’t slept for two weeks because the world was suddenly so clear and no one else seemed to see it. You never told her about the meds, the dark thoughts, the trips to the white room.
One night, panicked, you called to confess.
“I’ve been there, too,” she said.

#

That semester you’d been reading in class Hopkins’ The Windhover. The poem set you back—charged with cunning, spiraling deception.

You thought of Hermes sewing backward slippers over Apollo’s cows’ hooves before stealing them. Hermes had strung cow entrails across a tortoise shell creating the first lyre. Apollo had offered him all his cows for it when he heard him play.

You read the poem over and over—walking your dog, in the tub, before sleep—trying to pin down its elusive music. You never could. Though once you thought you heard Hermes ask Apollo, “But were the cows ever yours to begin with?”

A line in the poem went: “Ah, the mastery of the thing.”
You chanted it nonstop. A magic mantra.
As if that could have torn off the poem’s mask—let you follow the bloody hoofprints all the way back to Hermes’ music.

But what mastery? The falcon’s? The poem’s? The poet’s? Were you being played?
In hindsight, you’d been asking the wrong questions.
You never heard the music.
You never asked why.

#

One evening, after class, late winter light grazed her hair—rippling fleece, ancient melody predating consciousness—and you came so close to holding her hand while driving around aimlessly through a dying town in Yonkers.

You pulled up before a blighted horse racing track. Swirling hoofprints. Burning fog. She lowered the window, took out a cigarette, clicked the lighter.

The white room door swung open.
You walked inside.

Outside the window, Sir Francis Drake’s galleon, Golden Hind, bobbed off of San Francisco, stars throttled an indigo sky.

An opportunity to show off presented itself. You told her about your vision of Drake’s ship, of Othello’s molten ducats oozing down its broken rudder, when all you wanted was for her to lick the hot tears off your face, as you struggled to locate the soft edge of the jagged knife she was twisting through you.

As if that could have ever really dulled the pain.

3. Music as the Ring of Fire

Back in Syros, staring out at the water again, the question wasn’t what is music—you figured that was impossible to answer. Or where does it come from—you had Apollo’s lyre for that. The question was: how it’s made.

It seemed to you the answer had to be found in more than the sum of music’s parts, the ways you experienced it. More than sound waves, symbols on paper, geometric proportions, piano strings.

But look, you thought then, you’re doing it again, ‘avoiding’ as your therapist likes to tell you, because really this whole exercise boils down to one thing: why you never tried to connect, take her hand, while driving around that forlorn town.

(Which, if truth be told, was mostly because of her eyes, being too small for her face gave it a haunting strangeness—so, you learned too late that strangeness is the true hallmark of beauty, not symmetry, and how the ancient Greeks had got that so spectacularly wrong. Once, while drunk, ruing your trips to the hospital, your life’s crap choices, you told her that Sophocles and Euripides had it right: character is fate, which is why there’s tragedy. She laughed and said, “No. They were wrong. Nothing’s fixed.”)

#

Flash forward to the next summer after she’d left: sometimes you’re driving on the interstate going past billboards promoting legal services, glossy fast-food logos, auto-parts with money-back guarantees, talking to an empty passenger seat, reaching out to hold an imaginary hand.

You’re telling her about how much you miss your dog, your father who’d recently died, about how driving through the Catskills depresses you, because they were once part of a magnificent mountain chain, rivalling the Himalayas.

No doubt you’re boring her to death with all this talking, but you wish more than anything she was there, that she’d open the window and roll a cigarette, and you’d sit in silence and watch the air steal the smoke curling out of her mouth.

#

So why did you resist? Turn against yourself? Don’t say it was because of the impossibility of ever really knowing what anyone else wants, as the homeless man said.

No, it was because of the “who-are-you, what-are-we?” game you were playing—or avoiding. Because of all the things you’d never said but wanted to say. Because you were never sure if you were in a situational friendship or in something more that demanded a shared future.
The fictional game was what you remembered.
It was the most truthful.

#

“On your mark. Get set. Go,” she says.
The wind hoists you up to your wind hoverer.
(We all have our shadow wind hoverers—though we learn it too late.)

“Make your talon a stylus. Set it down into the air. Find the grooves that carry those lost echoes Hermes first strummed from the steaming bowels of Apollo’s sacred cows.”
(Moral: music is born from theft and violence.)

“Now for the fun part.”
“Rewind them, turn them back on themselves. Start with the original track. Yes, that’s it. You got it!”
“Did you hear it? Did you hear him sing? Wasn’t it beautiful?”
You nod back.
She lowers her head.
You know she knows you’re lying.
Whether she’s ashamed of your lie or your failure, you never knew.

#

Not the catharsis you expected, just a delayed discharge, the kind that creates the worst sorts of regrets.

Sure, after everything, you wanted to hurt her for leaving without a goodbye. Dark thoughts. But that only meant it was real.
You should be happy, right?
Not everyone gets to feel something so keenly.

Maybe that’s true.
Maybe it’s corny bullshit. Maybe it’s a bit of both. Then again, maybe you just got another consolation prize.

But you’re getting ahead of yourself.
For now, you’re in Crete, last stage of the journey, before she vanishes for good, taking in the moss and limestone from the Pomerol she’s drinking below a restaurant’s vine-covered pergola, her stray cats snoring in her lap.

Owls hoot from rooftops. All your memories of her pool in the caldera of her collarbones. Beyond stretches a plaza bookended by an Ottoman minaret.

She photographs children playing soccer in the plaza. Later she will post them on Insta. She puts the phone down and raises the glass of red wine to her lips. A swan’s neck unfurling. All your yearning distilled into that simple gesture.

There it was, the answer you’d been seeking the whole time, the mastery of the thing: real poetry is not written. It just ambushes you.

You wish you could have jumped into that pool between her neck and shoulders and swum there forever, because when you’d chased her to the Cyclades, you did the best you could to get through to her, to connect. You would have leapt, if she’d only taken your hand.

There was only water below us.
What was she so afraid of?

___________________________