a fall is a flight

The piano fell out of tune in February, which the tuner said would happen when he first came in December. It was May before I called him back. He said it should be good now until the end of the summer, when the shifting weather will drag the pitch in a million different directions.

This morning in its best new intonation the piano couldn't have expected the torture I'd put it through, mucking up some Bach. Variations on an aria in an Italian manner, in the manner of five sonnambulatic Italians in a potato sack race, with their ankles tied together on a pot-holed 70-degree incline.

But every variation repeats, giving me a chance that second or fifth time through to approximate triplets and grace notes, notes that by a generous reckoning might even register as 16ths, were the tempo slowed 200 percent and the listeners dosed with ketamine.

The problem is trying find the right note. Only one note is; the rest are garbage at best or at worst, fusion. The detective should say something clever and piercing; he shouldn't speak with the air of a spurned lover in a harlequin romance or don a Cincinatti Bengals uniform, unless that move comes in the service of solving the case. The sprinter doesn't squat to shit mid-way through the hundred yard dash, nor does the tight-rope walker at the midpoint of the wavering rope. Unless for either it is a shitting to absolve oneself of a tremendous weight, to sail onward to victory with unprecedented lightness.

By their own survival instinct the notes form lines, a sheet on a summer clothesline with storm wind under it, lifting it into concave sine patterns. For a second my Italians become airborne and a fall is a flight. Then I hit a clinker, and can't get the flow back. I have to go, it's time for work, and that's all I can think for the last few bars.