My daughter turns the match-thin handle
of the music box, its tiny metal teeth
plucking out "Love Me Tender"
slowing and increasing the tempo
of this tune she has learned this way,
its simple notes rising and falling
from her steady outstretched palm.
When I was her age, my older brother
and I rode in the back of a sweltering hot
station wagon while a calm and serious voice
broke through the radio announcing
that Elvis Presley, a man who seemed
to me to be from another planet, had died
suddenly, at his home in Memphis.
Death was a gray and mysterious thing;
but I knew that it meant an absence,
a silence which no one came back from.
Yet music lives upon air, much longer
than breath alone, writing and rewriting
itself at will -- and here it is again
on this most ordinary day in autumn,
dry leaves tapping at the window glass;
a day made all the more lovely by its brevity,
and because we are here to speak of it.
Which is to say that there is no need
for the saying, no need at all. This song,
however small, will do just fine.
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