In the Margin of the Music
1January: half the school year already folded behind them.
The band pours through a piece whose corners everyone seems to know,
past the quick turn, under the held note, straight into the ending.
I bring my clarinet case through the doorway sideways,
trying not to interrupt a sound that has learned
how to travel without me.
2One, two, three, four:
I count the empty measures printed before my entrance.
Across the room, shoes tap beneath familiar chairs.
Someone has drawn a tiny star above a difficult passage;
someone has crossed out a star and written BREATHE.
Their pages carry months of small instructions.
Mine lies clean beneath the lights,
bright as a question nobody has asked.
3I lift the instrument too soon.
My note steps into a silence that belongs to someone else.
The director lowers her hands.
Wait.
The word lands alone between two rows of chairs.
I study the silver keys instead of anyone’s face,
certain that every person in the room
is measuring the distance I have left to catch up.
4One player marks my entrance with a pencil borrowed from her pocket.
One player taps the waiting beats against the metal music stand.
One player hums the phrase that comes immediately before my own.
The director turns back to the opening measure, and the room settles into the particular quiet that comes before another try.
5This time I lift the clarinet
not to prove that January can disappear,
not to squeeze four months of practice into one clean breath,
but to place
one note
beside another.
The pencil mark waits at the edge of my vision.
A tapping shoe keeps time beneath the neighboring chair.
I hear the hummed phrase now carried by the flutes.
6One, two, three, four:
the same count, moving through more than my own hands.
My entrance is rough at the edge, but it is there.
The piece keeps going.
At the next rest, I write LISTEN in the margin,
small enough to leave room
for whatever I will need to write
when we begin again tomorrow.