Long after midnight quieted the hotel room,
I slept without companion, without incidence
until half-wakened by a sense of presence,
the sound of a duet more and less than dream,
violin and cello played beside my bed
or inside my head.
Some faulty venting brought them in,
two voices soft, then shaken into tremolo,
in intense dialog at first indistinct
yet real and pathetic,
so earnest as to seem internal
like parents' unforgettable quarrel.
My listening had no choice
as human meaning found its voice.
A man and woman, Alfred and Georgia,
spoke of making lovely music,
quietly at first,
then arguing a passionate theme of accompaniment.
In their swelling whispers
I heard the hint of string and reed,
but never discerned the order of their instruments.
Did I hear,
or did I dream or imagine their story?
Over long quarter-hours their dilemma emerged,
a unique paired agony,
a pained libretto of Paolo and Francesca,
eternally yearning disembodied lovers.
Wedded for a decade of duets on stage,
yet the duo found no earthly form for their relation
unguarded, as they thought, by audience.
In public music they blended to one entity,
sustaining each other even in the naked solo passages,
but lacking repertoire for private coupling.
As their quandary took shape and identity,
I began to see this disunited pair:
Alfred I imagined standing behind a chair
with his tie still on, his body hidden
but his thought exposed, raw to his partner
as their lyric filled the suite.
Georgia reclined, in my mind, on an oxblood divan.
In her lap lay some kind of book, the score
perhaps of their music abandoned to his visit:
the pages trembling with the text of desire,
the closeness of their performance
unslaked in a decade of unwed wedlock.
They sought offstage the solace of unison:
already connected mind to mind,
consummating an almost marital deadlock.
They could not look away from each other
in their high flight of notes,
craving the sight and sound of
something that joined them
like love but without the body,
a sensuous, fiery conjunction but without a touch.
I saw, even felt,
his fingers circling his lips
as he tempted them both, always with denial.
Over hours they played a cycle of verbal chords --
in gasping breath, anger charged with impossible tenderness,
nerve to nerve in rhapsodic counterpoint,
an intimacy of shared refusal.
I helplessly heard them, painfully linked
by what held them apart. The words dwindled
toward dawn and silence. With no kiss he left:
down our mutual hall his footsteps, then another door.
Alfred & Georgia, filling each other's lives and mine
with song I'll hear in other rooms.