#13

One instrument echoes in the subway halls. Fierce-tasting, insistent melody
full of fire. And people walk toward and away. The case is open and dotted
with little plinks of change sitting zazen on ripe red velvet. The player wears
a soft hat and does not look at the passersby. The motion of the trains does not 
harmonize with the stillness in the being of the one performing, perhaps 
for himself and likely beyond any central point. The interior of the building
is all about location, and for the artist that could be anywhere. A wailing traipse
of tonality makes its way to fits and starts of syncopation. Hesitation brinks itself
toward meaning very much inferred. Few stop moving but simply toss copper,
nickel, or silver into the case. Sometimes the player nods irrespective of where he is
in his pursuit of melody he discovers as he plays. The reed seems moistly cushioned
by his lips that appear not to need living wood. Instead the listeners may whisper
that this is a small, recurrent miracle just in time to be forgotten. The smell of the under-
ground forms a small umbrella shell to situate the mood that music might be.
Why does the player come here except to repeat a pattern he mostly knows or re-
discovers each morning among others, just as silent coffee drinkers convene in small
coffee shops saying nothing to anyone but being and doing just the same. Listen
to tones crawl upward into reverberation cling then let go toward repetition
then held like small treasures prepared to sound then evaporate unless carried 
by warm thin discoveries of light in sound arriving next to a constant 
and recognizable darkness covering the skin of commonality among accidental hearers.