Abbey wine
You snap the wooden tongs suspended from a wire hung to pull the projector screen down
which makes me feel a little better about the amount of cork I’ve managed to push
into this precious bottle of abbey wine from where your dad grew up, though you pivot
to finding a pour-over strainer. Hairs of nut-black wine streak my thumbs and wrists
when I wriggle out the chopstick I was using, leaving a hole the size of a pupil
without an iris, which in its ignorance and sensitivity lets everything in
from the projector: wild thyme busting open a castle wall, you and Eliana folding maamoul pouches
at midnight, just trays and trays to be ready by morning since no one can sleep
for the brief weeks you’re home, or a portrait in your childhood piano teacher’s foyer.
Later on I think of Jeremy, who sat every week on that bench and marched,
in familiar, open strokes, my twin’s fingers up and down the keys, since I had refused, and eventually
when I acquiesced and Jeremy sat on that bench with me I chopped a preliminary note on my clarinet and he hummed.
He drew my belly out by cupping his hand over my diaphragm and pulled the weight of air
atop my shoulder blades into my groin and butt by bracing the length of his forearm against me.
He hummed and when I blew again it sounded nothing like before, like the lapping of a brook
against a sudden turn beset by stones and pounded roots, and that was when everyone else came into the room
to see if my body had visibly changed: because of Jeremy I’d built a door of limber branches
towards the end of the expectant imitation of a youngest son. I know this now and knew it there
when I sat at the foot of your couch, with the knives and the chopstick, and abbey wine and monk’s bread,
listening to you and Noa test each others’ dialects, but how could I have known it then?
In fact all I did was cry. I cried and cried because of how the reed and mouthpiece vibrated on my front teeth
when I stood at that door. I didn’t tell him that was why, and for some reason unknown to me now
I didn’t say anything to that glowing pregnant living room of people. I only bared the resonant
tones on my teeth for a few more weeks, then made something up and stopped. Something remains
of that ignorance in me now, or there on your floor drinking out of a blackened strainer
and then, as always, waiting for later. Waiting for a final explanation, for the thin plastic bag of bitter almonds you will shake from a tree.