I am conscious of the time that it takes to write even these few lines. I prepare, but this is never enough this limbering up of the fingers, the percussive pop of each knuckle as the pianist pushes back the tails of his borrowed tuxedo. Settling onto the bench with an elegant aplomb, he begins to resuscitate the song. Begins to play her. The timing. The tapping of his foot. The wordless sound between the melodies. There is such a nauseating impatience in the listing of the metronome. With one rhythm set the rest will find relationship to that beat; then, the meters can multiply. Imagination can move lithely across the fractions. He is tickling the ivory and gold in the open mouth of his lover. The piano is the only voice that he trusts. Within the wooden hull in which the passengers murmuring can be heard, with the stroke of the rowers setting the mood and temperate, the clavier is a clever animal, a leviathan that rolls with the ocean's hunger: the moon tugs at hearts and seas and nightmares. Tide and sky and the watery ghosts that we will become, what we had imagined to be the evidence of some religion was rather just the evidence for physics....
I am conscious of the discreet minute in the discreet hour of the discrete day; the whole thing is held together by the faith we have in these numbers, this slicing up the space and time. Measure for measure, meter against might, the leaders are still hunting autographs of this or that signature of time. But to what purpose? For the sake of reference and memory? To fit together the stories we tell? And to anticipate the future...
"Prepare for proper sequencing. Follow. Begin. Begin countdown: 10-9-8--7--- 6--- 5---- 4---- 3-2-1." Pause, pause. "Ladies and gentleman, we have lift off." These are strange days at NASA where the countdown seems to snap and crackle, like fire popping--in livid embers--out of the campfire. Some seconds stretch and struggle. Some minutes linger. Some fingers play at music and some hands play at time.
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