Music Lessons For Grown-Up Children

            You could see his arms flinging above the water, his hands open, his fingers spread, as if trying to reach the sky.  His arms were bone white, like two white canes of blind men who stumble, lurch, and disappear into a vast hole.  The red tips of his fingers, like white canes, would be the last you would see of him.

            The waves, smooth and steady, kept washing over the spot.  Even from the shore you could see they had a cold, restrained anger, the kind you sometimes see in a friend who pretends concern, but moves hatred like an iceberg in front of you.

            A year later, you would see the same waves, washing over the same spot.  Nothing had been discovered, no body, no remains, no nothing.  Just the cold, restrained anger of the waves.

            Had he existed?  Was he real?  "Did I really give birth to him?  Who will remember except me," thought the crumpled mother.  "What was there to remember?  Had anything mattered?  What did he remember with his last look?  Did he think of us, his mother, his father?"

            "And must people ask, 'What is the matter?'  What does that mean?  Is the matter his body?  There is none.  Or is their concern the matter: why aren't they with me at night if they care.  Maybe none of this is even a subject: my brain can't connect.  I am lost."

            In her sitting room, every night alone, the broken mother would look at her jade and porcelain figures, caressing them, marveling at their fragility.  Then she would polish them to a sheen, replacing them on the shelves of the dark cabinet, their beauty protected by its glass doors.

            He had made that cabinet, carving griffins and gargoyles and Pan, the satyr, on it.  All his cabinets he had crowded with his carvings from the stone myths in his mind, his Easter Island mind.

            "I will watch TV tonight, I will work at the computer, I will read Plato.  At dawn my dogs will bark; they always do.  I will walk my dogs and walk, walk away from the water, from everything that once mattered."

            The woman cried as she thought these things, and planned her day.

            "I will walk to the spot, what must have been the spot, far out in the lake by the breakwater---  What does it matter?  I will walk and walk with my dogs out to the spot.

            And thoughts from the past flitter through her mind.