A Small Note / Listen to This

Abstract

A Small Note / Listen to This John Patrick Allen (bio) It feels both real and like a dream—or, more accurately, I feel the reality of loss in disjointed bursts, like a lurch downward in an airplane, like swimming in a pond and finding a patch of sudden and intense cold. His desk is still reliably stocked with pencils and paper clips. I need and even want to feel these moments. But to keep them from consuming me—to keep swimming or flying as I know he'd want me to—I must remember other moments, equally small, for which I'm endlessly grateful. That I happened to be driving to Danville when I learned he was in the hospital. That, nearly every time anyone asked him, he said he wasn't in pain. That even though he had some trouble speaking, trouble knowing exactly where he was and why, he was lucid enough to understand when I told him I loved him and respond that he loved me, too. I miss walking with him. Talking with him for hours over dinner going cold on both of our plates. Translating poetry with him. Just sitting with him in silence, reading. Listen to This My father learned to play flamenco fromCarlos Montoya crossing the Atlanticin a cargo ship, but never wroteone song himself—never wrote an essayto memorialize the way the old dark-eyed [End Page 15] maestro dragged and scraped the strings to screaming.My father gave his life to Don Quijote: learnedwhat every joke and twist of phrasing meant,tapped out what each 17th-century coinwould be worth, sacrificed his eyes and spineto shoulder every word Cervantes left usbut never wrote a story of his own. My mother loves my father for the wayhe loves Quijote: it's the same way sheloves Celestina—thorny medieval novel-poem-play. She knows that witch, knows thosetwo doomed amantes tangled in her in-cantations like they were just one more messed-up set of cousins to love anyway.But she never wrote about the million thingsthat could have been if Melibea'd toldCalisto this, suggested that—was therea way for them to live past the last line?My mom and dad are listeners. Maybe that's why I'm such a talker. FromBatman and Joker impromptus I'd cliffhangoff my bunkbed's edge, to debate-team practice,fixing the world in three to seven minutes,to frantic midnight phone calls pacing bridgeto bridge to bridge beneath the FDR'shard shelter, talking to convince myself,through them, to leave, or take, some job, to leaveor find a love, to see or not to seea shrink. I thought it was my voice's forcethat built my wings—I thought I got my gloryfrom a harmony of hands, lips, lungs—from me. [End Page 16] But it was them. Whatever force I feltI had, they gave me, lent me, listening. Blessed are the listeners,who glide their pitying fingers over allgorgeous nonsense poets regurgitate,who choose to breathe the tiny flecks of oilthat flake from disintegrating paintings inthe Met, who smile at actors flailing, turnaway, and go do something useful. Ifyou can watch a play without hearing one lineyou could've written better, you are betterthan I am. If you can read a book without feeling that full, electric but still evilwish to leap up, yell or scribble overtopthe speaker, you are who we're aching for.If you can read this now—just read it, lovewhat's here of me to love, discard what won'tever be good enough, feel nothing morecomplex than joy, then you make my words matter.Like my dad did. Like my mom does. You are a listener. Blessed are the listeners,blessed the curators, the editors,the stans, the fan-fiction devourers,the citers, quoters, my mother and father—You keep Quijote, Celestina, mebreathing. Blessed are you. And blessed wewhen we permit ourselves to listen. Thank youso much. [End Page...