RunHaiku

After the performance, another student who went on to a career as a professional opera singer in Vienna came up to me and said, Linford, what was that? It was like the whole room changed. Did you feel it? I could feel the music on my skin.

I wasn’t sure what to do with that feedback at the time, but I thanked him. And yes, I have come to believe that when you put certain musicians together there can be a chemistry — a sort of chemical reaction — that people can feel on their skin. Music can make the body begin to change in real time.

Linford Detweiler, Over the Rhine #

I heard it on my skin, the time you began to play your piano, head down, nobody but a crowd milling about the room. My friend turned, his tingling skin lighting up his eyes with water. Where did the music come from, a well so deep we could feel it in our toes and welling up.

A quiet pool
Reflection of
Music on the skin

Every two hours. Up at the smallest whimper indicating unrest. Slipping into a hoodie and crocs to watch in the dark a dog the colour of night relieving her discomfort.

I watch the stars in their orbit. At 2am orion is rising in the southeast, 4am he’s shifted his weight to the south.

But then, out of the corner of my sleep-ridden eyelids, a dancing light. In the north. The aurora, ever elusive, appearing only when most soundly sleep, appearing from behind the neighbour’s willows, dancing up and across the sky.

Quickly rapping the bedroom window, I wake my sleeping wife to the spectacle. Even as the pup pads through the darkness around our feet, we watch, breathless, the dancing lights.