Notched in the Bow of a Wave

After she left the first thing Ahmad Jamal played was a bridge: he fingered water falling over a cantilever & made a dark blue truth transparent. I try to suspend belief across a span of hand- written notes. At noon, I cross myself over a painted bridge in Pittsburgh, sauntering from Station Square to Smithfield St haunted by a smell along the Monongahela. These streets cobble stone memories, work overtime in my olfactories. Once, my piano-playing girlfriend fingered daisies waving in a breeze. Then in love with her Noes I began sniffing everything. But the florid truth is that I gave her a ring of rust on her windowsill. A heart broken like a line in a poem. My girl left me, & Ahmad Jamal was playing “Wave” on my iPod. It’s probably not smart to admit this, but what he didn’t play came across loudest. I only saw her hands say goodbye because of the beauty in my earbuds. Then I nosed a wine- bottle blue scarf she’d left on the right arm of a chair. Be honest, would you have sniffed it? What song doesn’t long for the long fingers of a pianist? A cantilever here only holds up meaning. I smelled farewell in a coffee shop as she high-heeled east. Sunlight buttered loafing pedestrians, shadowed crossing things as I wondered whether Jamal’s main fault was living too long and weathering, if his main technique was to cleave themes or to refrain. As he plays, the heart gives out a rapid repeat. A piano bench pines to be dusted with notes, can it buckle up such wont? Maybe there are facets of bridges one will always truss, something phonic and unforgettable about how they allow us to cross. A wave of daisies in a vase — how they ravel aromatic in the mind. Ahmad Jamal waving across the room: me damned, & roiling underneath like a river. Maybe I dreamt this. But when I licked my fingertips to turn the page, they became daisies pushing between bricks on a twilit bridge.