There, Here, Jazz

The first time I walked into our new old house, it was the light
that surprised me—how much of it fell through the four windows
facing south and landed wide across the floorboards—something
the video my husband had taken, which was all I’d seen of this house
before we bought it, hadn’t shown. That late morning, late December, only
a few more hours before it dimmed, the light seemed to shake in rhythm
with the notes of jazz spilling from the radio and the paint dripping
from the brush my husband lifted from the can he held.
I thought of our first or second married Halloween, when we went
to an art-department party in Florida and he played the part
of Jackson Pollock, splattering imaginary paint from an empty can
onto the ground while I held an unlit cigarette as Lee Krasner
in a gray pleated 1950s skirt. I thought of the love letters I’d just
been sorting through, of how deciding whether to hold on
to a decades-old note from a now stranger I once loved, a note that still holds
its roundness from being wound around my bicycle frame with green
ribbon, is like curating the heart’s museum. Almost like playing Minecraft,
where hearts represent your life and you can respawn
and delete whatever world you’d been playing in, start another life
in a new one. I thought of how long it had been since I’d listened
to jazz, which belonged under that large heading of PAST
ever since my first boyfriend had played and listened to nothing else.
Now it plays in our house all the time, and I love
not knowing where the next phrase will land while still knowing
every solo will come back around to the center.
Our son is learning how to play the saxophone, learning how to breathe,
to make smooth phrases of notes that glide down the stairs
in this house with its shaking light.