Let the Last Thing Be Song by Hannah Fries

Let the Last Thing Be Song

 

i.

 

Memory is safest in someone with amnesia. 

Behind locked doors 

glow the unmarred pieces— 

musical notes humming 

in a jumble, only 

waiting to be 

arranged.

 

ii.

 

What is left in one 

who does not remember? 

Love and music.

 

Not a name but the fullness. 

Not the sequence of events 

but order of rhythm and pitch,

 

a piece of time in which to exist.

 

iii.

 

A tone traveling through space has no referent, 

and yet we infer, and yet it 

finds its way between our cells 

and shakes us.

 

Aren’t we all still quivering 

like tuning forks 

with the shock of being, 

the shock of being seen?

 

iv.

 

When I die, I want to be sung across the threshold. 

Don’t you? Doesn’t the universe, 

with its loosening warp 

and weft, still 

unspool its symphony?

 

Sing to me — please — 

and I will sing for you as all unravels, 

as time continues past the final beat 

of the stutter inside your chest.

 

Harmonize, at the edge of that horizon,

with the black hole’s 

fathomless B-flat.