In front of the Quickstop
I sit in my car, transfixed:
on the radio Mozart's little Sonata
in C, scarred long ago with exasperated
corrected notes (G, G!), piano
loudly underscored—by Miss Levitt,
the first who didn't come to us
for gossip, coffee and cake. 

That fall and winter, Mondays, after school,
I rode the El alone to the North Bronx
and her deep-porched frame house,
shadowed by tenements. She would raise my wrists
with her index finger, then sit down,
fold her hands in her lap, and gaze
at the busts of great composers
on her windowsill, until my first mistake.

And now, sforzando!
this time, stunning thunder;
and now staccato, this time,
elegant as satin toes
on point.
And now
the recapitulation
of the theme, ritardando, delicate,
almost inquiring,
like memory
saying over something
that will never 
be said again—

“The sonata facile,” Miss Levitt observed,
pressing the pages flat on the stand.
But I labored—swaying,
haunted—over the bridge
in the andante cantabile
to the minor key—

now, as I hear it again,
forty years later, more
beautiful, more sad,
still keeping its secrets...

		like light
shifting in a room
when wind has scattered clouds
against the sun

		or the wash of evening
deepening to indigo outside
city windows, before the lamps
go on...

Everything in the music,
in our lives,
waiting,
waiting!

A few soft words of Russian
like a mother's guttural hush, overlaid
by the morning anchor's voice, then
fading, and I feel a kindly affection
for this language my student son
and his girl also murmur—
over our heads, like parents
using the language of secrets
from children. A few words of
Arabic jumpy with glottal stops,
before the voice-over drowns out Arafat’s 
spokesperson in Ramallah,
and I fondly hear my daughter
(who’s studying Arabic in New York)
practicing with the Arab-American cabby
who shepherds her from the station,
kidding him in a joke-bargain
with well-used idioms about “when the apricots come”
(“I’ll pay that outrageous 
fare then!), charming him by not forgetting to add
“If Allah wills.” And then I recall
that, last night, in the Esperanto
of my dreams, my dead mother
stroked my infant hair and whispered
“Chavele, little bird” —her throaty, husky
kh, which could have been in Arabic, Russian, 
or Scottish, as well as her own Yiddish,
good as the bread of home: heavy, dark
and rich. And suddenly I’m thinking how important
it might be that all these
languages feel close and moist
and warm, like sister or cousin, if not mother
tongues, licking my whelp fur.

This is in those first suspenseful minutes
of the day, the morning news just over
on the car radio, and nothing too terrible in it,
the almost unbearable swell
opening some great symphony on the morning concert
imprinting itself, like the first miraculous
language ever, on the tabula rasa of my heart,
as I pull into the stream of traffic
on my way to work.