I heave
the window open
to hear the flautist's music.
Still it comes in fragments,
each far sweeter than any voice,
notes like blossom blown past
on the wind. She must be close.
My fingers sweat, darken paper,
smudge poems, relics, notes
that begin and end in the fantasies
of scholars. They vanish
into lines of dots, lines of stars;
are pressed petals, echoes
of some beautiful whole.
One long disembodied passage
reaches me and then
is gone; what comes before,
what comes after, is lost
somewhere between us, swallowed
by heavy summer air. I sigh
into the wind. The wind, the heat,
blank spaces and lines of stars
keep her music from me.
