I bought him a flute when he was twelve
and he could have played it on one foot
with one eye closed looking into a mirror
at music he had never seen.
He played like the moon he knew before he was told.

Only music brings the moon to the middle window
like this.
Where it loses color entirely, where it no longer
needs to be defined as light.

Where it presses
at your temples, limits the peripheral
filling you with wild relief.

Your furniture and other people swing up
swiftly to be flung, and you,
ninety-nine times as high as the sphere

where portions of souls drift,
garnering memory
in case their bodies ever happen
to be jigging at the blue dark.

At sixteen, he gave music up
and for him
I know no equivalent loss.

He played the way ducks fly over
in half-silhouette
wings going the speed between hummingbirds
and herons, exactly between.