There’s a question at hand, and it’s crude,
in the garden beyond the Hall of Music,
where some bright thing, for the amazement
of another, has stripped to a cliche of
flesh and moonlight, then raised herself to sit
on the cool, black face of a marble sundial.

Is this where the story begins, or is it sooner,
before they’ve grown tired of moving in whispers
through the Hall of Music's cubbied rows,
returning wax cylinders to their shelves, punched rolls
of paper from player pianos, shellacked
reliquaries of breath that couldn’t hold itself, held.

It must be here, in the hours handling those old 
standards, early blues, in the crucible of hushed 
proximity and full-lit swelter, they’re compelled
to stake the draw of body to body against
the cloistered voices’ crooning witness, to try if
shared desire can resolve their separateness.

Is it the question that’s crude, or our need
to crush life into metaphor, to see these two
as anything more than what they are: young
and willing and naturally bored? Steam rises 
where her skin confronts the marble's cold,
and the boy, the boy is afraid he’s gone too far

out of his depth, pulled unawares into the path
of adolescent expectation, unsure of what comes next
beyond the naked obvious. The girl leans back 
to feel the marble style slot to the base of her spine,
shivers and moans for form, hears nothing
to convince her in their irrespective songs.

And, Listener, we, late in our chairs, at our windows,
are afraid. Afraid that we’ve only embellished
a nightbird’s trill. We train our ears for one note 
more from the anxious distance, for uncaptivated voices 
to fill it with their artless swell, to lift the strains
of marriages gone soundless in the dark.

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