Notes skitter like leaves across my autumn ears.
Yearning at the end of Honeck’s baton sends me
to Armenia in the forties.

I walk through the Khosrov forest,
hum the lilt of day, watch light 
dapple forest ferns.

Five Year Plans, Stalin, and the Department of Agitation and Propaganda 
are insolvent, vaporous, ephemeral as teapot steam.

No one stops me when I approach the podium.

Do you travel to the Khosrov when you conduct this piece, Manfred?
I pull on his tux-cuff to get his attention.

What, he grunts? I’m conducting an orchestra you oaf!

I repeat my question.
He softens.

Yes, it’s where my mind goes.
He turns a page of score.
The fingers of his right-hand hold
the baton as if it’s a long-stemmed rose.
His left-hand floats upwards
to whisper on a lover’s breast.

I stand, he says, by the Azat and hear 
it purl through Khachaturian’s strings,
wander through junipers and oaks—
hide in a spinney of sound.

Welcome, my friend, he smiles.
There are footsteps here to follow.
                        

Today, in our backyard, I hear the ratchet sound 
again, just like yesterday. I turn on the Bird Finder 
App a friend helped us download. It says the sound 
comes from a blue jay.

No, I think. I’ve never heard a blue jay make that sound.

I look up and there’s a blue jay 
in our service berry bush 
ratcheting away. 

It must be his call of love, I think,
tough love uttered to attract female blue jays
from the other side of the tracks—
city blue jays who dodge busses,

cars, and exhaust fumes, jays
that hang around dumpsters behind
restaurants, discerning but grateful
for crumbs of buttered French bread,

someone’s half eaten pancake,
or le meilleur repas: pieces of salmon
and bone, jays who only reluctantly accept
the easy handout from our feeders.

I want to celebrate the rachet sound
of our randy city jays who survive
by their wits and never let traffic,
smog, or fate stop them from 
pecking out life’s tasty morsels,
the best it has to offer.
                        

One day it will be my last day. 

No one will enjoy the sight of the song sparrows
and gold finches perched in our birch tree,
or take delight, in the way I do, in those mystery
chords at the end of the first movement 
of Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto.

No one’s heart will stop just as mine does
when a monarch butterfly flits across 
our flowerbeds.

No one will feel the soft touch 
of my wife’s hand
or the curl of my cat’s furry body 
in my lap.

There will be nothing but space where I once was.

This will be momentous to no one.

My dog will feel lost until someone offers
her that next treat and my wife and son
will be sad, but the force of life will
carry them to their own trials and triumphs.

I will not even be in the dark.
I won’t have dark anymore.

I’ll be a memory that will fade beneath the inscape of a few friends.

Maybe someone will pick up a poetry book
that has my name on it some day and wonder,
Who was that guy?

But not for long.