Each of the cords had a colored clip on the end, she held them out one by one. White goes on the right, she said, snapping it on to the sticker on the right side of my chest. Smoke, she said, placing the black wire across from it, over fire, which was the red wire, which she attached beneath, on my left ribs. Snow she said, tapping the white wire,

the only technologies I knew anything about were antiquated, unnecessary technologies: iambic pentameter, functional harmony, the ablative absolute.

the Gloria, Et in terra pax. Frank let it play for a moment, the Renaissance polyphony that always sounds to me like petals opening, a rose blooming in time-lapse photography;

all art is a message, we want to communicate something but maybe not an entirely graspable something, maybe there’s a kind of sense only non-sense can convey; so that the poem becomes not just a message but an object of contemplation, of devotion even, inexhaustible. It had been my whole life, puzzling over phrases, trying to account for the unacco

It was one of my favorite poems, authorless, mysterious, the first two lines unparsable: Westron wynde, when wyll thow blow, The smalle rayne downe can Rayne,

Westron Wynde,

John Taverner, a Renaissance composer

Kathleen Ferrier, whose recordings I had listened to endlessly; one of the first CDs I bought as a teenager, just after I discovered music, classical music I mean, was a recording of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde and three of the Rückert lieder,