fourteenth day: the adagio  

morning at the train station
waiting for the south-bound
a pigeon sticks his head
into my view, shocks me
because I’ve found a small vista,
across six lanes
and through a small window —
a reminder of mountains —
the slope across 118th is snow covered
the light, uneven — makes it look
like the side of a mountain
and I am fixed on this image
The pigeon looks at me
through the window
his tilting gray-green, shiny head;
makes me smile.

a woman on the train
bemoans the fact that she’s old:
“When I turned 24, I lied so much
about my age, I started to believe
the lie,” she says. “I got to the point where
I really didn’t know how old I was.”
The guy she’s sitting/talking with
keeps his face flat, uncommitted.
He fiddles with his ipod.
“Surprisingly, 25 was no big deal,” she adds.
Surprisingly, 46 isn’t that bad, I think.

At Starbucks they’re not playing
“happy, perky, trendy” music
but rather Barber’s Adagio for strings
and I’m caught by it, want to bathe in it.
“you’re playing Barber’s Adagio?” I say
to a young woman who gives me
a nearly perfect vacuous look.
“It’s such a sad piece,” I add.
“What’s it about,” she says, as if she is
expecting someone to start singing.

But we have a financial relationship,
this woman and I.
Each morning, she hands me
a grande bold, smiles,
and I give her money.
If she only knew how this music
transports me.

But
perhaps her question is not so daft.

It is about love lost. It touches the
human condition. It’s the space between
Adam’s finger and God’s.
It’s about a memory so sweet
and so loving and so lost.
It’s about digging around in melancholy.
It evokes touch and smell too well.
It’s about far too much.
There is no room for Barber’s Adagio
in our relationship.
But there is room for me
inside the music.
So I sit in the window with my coffee
close my eyes, and listen.

© 2007 Thomas Trofimuk