Silent Music My wife wears headphones as she plays Chopin etudes in the winter light. Singing random notes, she sways in and out of shadow while night settles. The keys she presses make a soft clack, the bench creaks when her weight shifts, golden cotton fabric ripples across her shoulders, and the sustain pedal clicks. This is the hidden melody I know so well, her body finding harmony in the give and take of motion, her lyric grace of gesture measured against a slow fall of darkness. Now stillness descends to signal the end of her silent music. Afterlife He said he believed in life after death. The proof would be his haunting the landscape here. I would see him in the shifting breath of wind when a storm blew in from the cape, the flash of bittersweet light at dawn, the time he loved best, or in a wren's song. I would see and hear my brother's own life linger in mine, and look for him in long drawn-out moments before the tide turns, or in winter rains that never seem to end. [End Page 78] There he is, in the drenched sword fern's steady drip after the skies clear, in the bend of its leaves, the deeper greening. Or now, in sun laced by haze, the way flaring beams pinpoint moss on a newly fallen oak bough instead of the solid earth on which it leans. Monet at Giverny, 1921 Even now, waking in garden shade sixty years later, as afternoon light softens around him, Monet remembers Algerian dawns. He sees sun-drenched color blaze where there is only haze. He smells lemon as roses bloom around his chair. For a glimmering moment he is back in the place that taught him how to see. His Algeria was never the desert drama of Delacroix, all rearing stallions and blood-crazed lions, tigers, falcons. It was not exotic women with servant and hookah in lavish apartments. Monet saw it as wispy mornings of crimson air blanched of blues. His fellow cadets slept through a riot of violets and yellows at noon, the rippling leaves of their tents green in afternoon sun. Sudden breeze carried a winking glaze that was saffron at heart. Nothing looked the way he thought it would. Nothing held still [End Page 79] beyond the moment of being seen. Color lived, and therefore color changed as time turned his eyes true. Then he fell ill, came home raving of the world renewed by Sahara winds. It seems now, as his mind clears, that part of him was always old after Algeria. He struggles to his feet, struggles for balance. The Japanese bridge spanning his water garden is a mere arc of crumbling sand till he blinks it back together. Remember Remember, she says, for the rest of us are bound to forget. Her voice is a shadow of itself, calling us closer, the message all in her restless eyes, clouded by cataracts. We hold her hand. Remember, her silences say. She sees nothing beyond herself in this room filled with winter light, her son and his wife, their mingled breath. Not long ago, she would have sung into the space between them, hummed when words failed her. No more. Remember is now the only word left to her. That, and silence, which is a word in the place she is nearing, where winter light is the same thing as summer dark.