line, angle, curve

He held his first accordion in Los Angeles, child-sized for children’s hands,

one hand fluttering up and down the keys,

 

elbows pressing in and spreading out until the catch of the bellows made

rectangles before an answering compression

 

opened the angles to the triangles that gave the music breath. When he was

20s slim, hair and pupils shiny, slick, and dark,

 

youth’s geometry replicated yet more restrained, his trousers honed to creases

less forgiving than the folds between his hands,

 

music was memory rather than thought, more curve and cycle among friends

than the lines his mother angled.

​

                       In between, my hands

 

stumble on the flatness and duplicity of keys, unrolled from edge to unyielding

edge, stories clipped to translate from notation to letter

 

to pressure. Pause, strike, stretch, repeat, find the form to count and measure,

find the phrasing that turns units into grammar,

 

syntax into love. It’s more than this. More than the tracing of design. It’s what

we were born to know, my son, my father, and me.

 

As if our wings folded inward before flight, brandishing the hidden call

for response caged within the rippling of our bones.

 

Without erasure or retake. Unrecorded. Making music that lingers without

expression yet jostles in the ear. Forming

 

shapes the eye insists are true and here. Trusting in a future that balances

the pressure of keys with the expansion of air.