Maestro

Maestro

He left what was left of his genius in her care that night.
The scores, the gestures, the baton were left on a podium.
He let her set the tempo, ensure correct entries into the music of the night,
interpret the score of the romance. At the river bank,
she conducted they’d drop their clothes on the bank. She followed
the whistle, the gurgle, the shhh s, orchestrating the vee of her wake
into the cool water. He followed hearing how her body changed the river’s sound.
“Do you hear it?” She laughed splashing him. “The water is always talking.
There’s a reason it’s called a babbling brook. Sometimes they are shouting
warning signs, other times irritated, but tonight I think she’s content.”
He felt strange in the content water. Sound is a mechanical energy,
anything that exhibits movement can make sound. The sound
requires somewhere to travel in or be conducted through them. He could feel
the sound moving through them, through the trees, through the Lub-dub
noise his heart made as it excitedly pumped and circulated blood in his body,
opening and closing valves. Vibrations make sounds. He knew this.
Sometimes in the simple, it is possible to agree: the world works.
The long windless night, her long tan shimmering legs.
The dropped clouds, almost skimming, flirting with the night lands.
The soft footed poems being sunk into the sand by their footprints.
The small voiced loon calling out to the great full moon in the sky.
Sinking down into a feeling. She knows this as he knows music.
She conducts the concert of glances, her baton lashes wet and pronounced
point at him to enter into the symphony of feelings swelling around her.
The river warmed more by her eyes than the weather. The sounds flirt.
He never heard the water in this way. He may never hear it the same again.
It wasn’t about sex, it’s about the music of breathe and drew her toward him.
For a few hours, he forgot about his neurotic innards, his addiction
To producing perfectly pitched sounds and took root in the mud of the creek.
For those hours he let himself be a tulip under the sun of her fingers.