Pure Interval
For Nick Serrambana
Nick said you can tell something is beautiful when you find the pitch
it reaches somewhere in the northward bones of your face
between the brows. Then we all crossed eyes like revenants
to hear the resonation better. We felt that—a flicker
between our sensory pathways across the table. Nick had a voice
teacher who told him to look for pitch in the bones
between his eyebrows. Since then I’ve been waiting
until it feels like singing to think. If my bones are hammered
at harmonic intervals. I watched Nick sing
to match the high notes he plucked
off his contrabass. That simultaneity. Sometimes I drummed
around his notes until a rhythm linked up. Arteries reverberate
like strings at the right altitudes and temper.
The map bodies makes of resonance makes music
a tautology. Tonality when the expected arrives
In the parts of me I didn’t know could hope. Sound becomes particulate
in slow weather and a shiver invents
a bony back road in the cold. Music is an unconscious
exercise in arithmetic in which the mind doesn’t know it is counting.
Loneliness grows in an oblivious metronome.