Let The Last Thing Be Song
by Hannah Fries
Memory is safest in someone with amnesia.
Behind locked doors
glow the unmarred pieces—
musical notes humming
in a jumble, only
waiting to be
arranged.
What is left in one
who does not remember?
Love and music.
Not a name but the fullness.
Not the sequence of events
but order of rhythm and pitch,
a piece of time in which to exist.
A tone traveling through space has no referent,
and yet we infer, and yet it
finds its way between our cells
and shakes us.
Aren’t we all still quivering
like tuning forks
with the shock of being,
the shock of being seen?
When I die, I want to be sung across the threshold.
Don’t you? Doesn’t the universe,
with its loosening warp
and weft, still
unspool its symphony?
Sing to me — please —
and I will sing for you as all unravels,
as time continues past the final beat
of the stutter inside your chest.
Harmonize, at the edge of that horizon,
with the black hole’s
fathomless B-flat.
