April 27, 2020

My Mother's Hands

Music eludes, infiltrates. It seeps through cracks
like the smell of warm coffee. It rises, wafts, lifts,
evanesces, and finally spirits away like so much
pollen or a flock of starlings, startled and swirling.

If I understand anything about music, it is that it
slips through fingers like water or air.  Not my
fingers, mind you. My fingers are dumb, clumsy
digits not well wired to my nerve center; thick.

But I've lived with music on tap, the faucet off
limits to me on account of my dumb hands, but
freely tapped at will, on a whim, or in search of
something like flight by skilled, masterful hands.

My mother's hands are works of art in their own
right, large and muscular, wingspanned for piano
octaves and landscaped with veins like the giant,
ancient river beds of Mars that ran strong and blue

before their waters ascended bodily into the heavens.
Did starlings once swirl over those waters? Did they
too ascend bodily, raptured with the waters of Mars
to sing in the chorus of the Music of the Spheres?