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Music is time, said the violin master. You can’t miss the stop or you’ll miss the train. One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four.

Oh father, oh music man with a whistle instead of a coin to toss on your walks, keep these things for us until we're ready to come home: our baby teeth, fragments of bone that rattle in a domino box. Tuck it in your pocket but please don't gamble it away the way you lost our christening gowns in poker. We had outgrown them, true, but what other proof did we have that all seven of our outfits could be stacked and shuffled like a deck of cards. Keep the bottle cap opener hanging by a string. Wear it like a locket and stay collared to our after-school bliss when we found you underneath a tree that scattered glass fruit around your feet. The boys lined them up for death by slingshot, and the girls giggled when the bodies shattered. Take good care of our drawings, our crooked handwriting exercises, the scribbles of our names, and sew a suit with sailboats on the sleeves, a coat with Qs sliding down a wire, and pants that celebrate our prepubescent autographs. And in your shoe— don't tell us which! let us guess!— save the coin you told us came from China. It had a hole in the middle because the merchants slid their change on chopsticks. We pictured them on market Sundays holding up their earnings like a shish kabob. We know you hid the coin because all seven of us wanted it and so you took it with you. Or so I claimed. Can I be blamed, oh father, oh story man, for wanting to possess the single thing that couldn't be shared? You saw me slide it out the window of your wallet while you napped and didn't snap to attention to complain. Of all your sons and daughters it is I who wanted to escape the most, to anywhere. I learned the desperate alchemy of flowering a barren day with song from you, oh master. A minstrel needs his freedom. And so you let me take it.

Music, when soft voices die, Vibrates in the memory— Odours, when sweet violets sicken, Live within the sense they quicken. Rose leaves, when the rose is dead, Are heaped for the belovèd's bed; And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone, Love itself shall slumber on.

I. WHAT was he doing, the great god Pan, Down in the reeds by the river ? Spreading ruin and scattering ban, Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat, And breaking the golden lilies afloat With the dragon-fly on the river. II. He tore out a reed, the great god Pan, From the deep cool bed of the river : The limpid water turbidly ran, And the broken lilies a-dying lay, And the dragon-fly had fled away, Ere he brought it out of the river. III. High on the shore sate the great god Pan, While turbidly flowed the river ; And hacked and hewed as a great god can, With his hard bleak steel at the patient reed, Till there was not a sign of a leaf indeed To prove it fresh from the river. IV. He cut it short, did the great god Pan, (How tall it stood in the river !) Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man, Steadily from the outside ring, And notched the poor dry empty thing In holes, as he sate by the river. V. This is the way,' laughed the great god Pan, Laughed while he sate by the river,) The only way, since gods began To make sweet music, they could succeed.' Then, dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed, He blew in power by the river. VI. Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan ! Piercing sweet by the river ! Blinding sweet, O great god Pan ! The sun on the hill forgot to die, And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly Came back to dream on the river. VII. Yet half a beast is the great god Pan, To laugh as he sits by the river, Making a poet out of a man : The true gods sigh for the cost and pain, — For the reed which grows nevermore again As a reed with the reeds in the river.

Everything about the young foreign taxidermist was overdone. Did he absolutely have to wear the apron with the tiny red castles in the shop? Or weave, at night, in and out of the trees? I don’t think so. I would bring him buckets of ice water day after day hoping he would just cool off a bit. Fact is, he never did. But to be fair, he really was practicing what the papers called, “heroic medicine.” It was love. I admit it. It was fancy love. I was the envy of the world, being hitched up with such a genius, and that felt good. Of course, these days, I can’t touch rope or a small child without thinking of him. Without expecting his large hands to come out of nowhere. We were, as mother said, both “slowly losing our minds.” He’d talk for hours about hygiene, the Water Cure for example, and wrote an award-winning essay on the Electric Bath as a way to treat hysteria in the female fox. “Too many foxes,” he would say, shaking his fist, “too many foxes running around like chickens with their heads cut off.” In the winter months we would ride our bicycles down to the scrap-metal yard where he would make love to me in devout silence. The delight in his eyes when he found that small cage! He was both tender and rough, and I had never, and will never again, be as touched by another man. I didn’t notice the black mustache growing slowly but unmercifully on his left shoulder until two or three years into the affair. At first it seemed harmless. A small patch of dead grass. But eventually I couldn’t help but only see the large dark field. Its silent twitching. By then it was already early fall, and the fact is, it tore us apart.

Even at my favorite coffeeshop downtown, Redford is a hard man to feed. This morning, he picks at his Grilled Asiago Mastercrust with a slow, disdainful frown. Could they spare the fromage on this so-called "treat?" He takes a sip of hazelnut coffee, then winces delicately into the neck of his sweater vest. I bite powerfully through my Cinnamon Frenchroll:Well, if you really don't think you got enough—"fromage"—you should just go back up there & tell the girl

From low to high doth dissolution climb, And sink from high to low, along a scale Of awful notes, whose concord shall not fail; A musical but melancholy chime, Which they can hear who meddle not with crime, Nor avarice, nor over-anxious care. Truth fails not; but her outward forms that bear The longest date do melt like frosty rime, That in the morning whitened hill and plain And is no more; drop like the tower sublime Of yesterday, which royally did wear His crown of weeds, but could not even sustain Some casual shout that broke the silent air, Or the unimaginable touch of Time.

The flower that smiles to-day To-morrow dies; All that we wish to stay Tempts and then flies. What is this world's delight? Lightning that mocks the night, Brief even as bright. Virtue, how frail it is! Friendship how rare! Love, how it sells poor bliss For proud despair! But we, though soon they fall, Survive their joy, and all Which ours we call. Whilst skies are blue and bright, Whilst flowers are gay, Whilst eyes that change ere night Make glad the day; Whilst yet the calm hours creep, Dream thou—and from thy sleep Then wake to weep.

I. We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon; How restlessly they speed and gleam and quiver, Streaking the darkness radiantly! yet soon Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:— II. Or like forgotten lyres whose dissonant strings Give various response to each varying blast, To whose frail frame no second motion brings One mood or modulation like the last. III. We rest—a dream  has power to poison sleep; We rise—one wandering thought pollutes the day; We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep, Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:— IV. It is the same!—For, be it joy or sorrow, The path of its departure still is free; Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability.

They talk of short-lived pleasure–be it so– Pain dies as quickly: stern, hard-featured pain Expires, and lets her weary prisoner go. The fiercest agonies have shortest reign; And after dreams of horror, comes again The welcome morning with its rays of peace. Oblivion, softly wiping out the stain, Makes the strong secret pangs of shame to cease: Remorse is virtue’s root; its fair increase Are fruits of innocence and blessedness: Thus joy, o’erborne and bound, doth still release His young limbs from the chains that round him press. Weep not that the world changes–did it keep A stable, changeless state, ’twere cause indeed to weep.