Adagio

The music tiptoes through the room careful not to wake the sleeping photographs of the dead their lives trapped behind glass amongst vast fields of wallpaper violets stopping to caress the singular beauty of the rose dreaming in its chipped vase of the garden where it was born curtains led by a breeze into their dance gazing upon the green that unfurls about the house the music wounded now by a tear that grown upon her cheek note by note a woman staring into space the cat asleep upon her toes the music retreating back into the mahogany cabinet curling itself into its circle a whirlpool of black shellac the music lost in the silence only its breathing audible now in the runoff groove the needle returning to its proper place with a click the last light stealing across the lawn