Saltando
Bare footfalls press alternating stamps into weightless runs of sand. Lightsole crumbles turn shale as the view bends east, arcing out of civilisation's reach where broad stone platforms honeycomb a thousand liquid mirrors, each a garden of crab scramble and urchin pocket beneath hollowed lean of (world towering on world, soaring) rockfaced ternary lines - a coal stave at intervals root, third and fifth, each metre ten vertical centuries of accreted particles, reverse disintegration blooming dark scanlines against Leif’s view. He blinks ocean spray and sees again what he saw of her not ten minutes ago, startled by the ease of her familiarity.
She remembered him, somehow, from last week, in the dark: the fanning of her dress like an umbrella, like the mosaic petals of a night-blooming datura (Angel’s Trumpet) as she revolutioned to a raw drum and bass loop left on repeat on the unattended decks at the street fair, and then so unlike him - he thinks about this while ambling up a rise of pebbles that swell like a buried heartbeat into boulderish slabs - fingers reaching towards the keys of a 1977 Rhodes MK1 stage piano, he couldn’t help it, jamming out a syncopated paradiddle of double octaves and borrowed melodic hooks that she smiled at, at him, teeth and gums, until a crowd gathered and he got shy.
Foam spray pearled and scattered on Leif’s shins, a dusting of cold, shattered sea lace, a quick outbreath of ocean piped up between rock declivities, as he plays out the muscle memory of his fingers retreating from the keys, again he reaches into the air and sees them subtract. Katita, she introduced herself after, told him how wonderful his playing was, with the same smile she had just now on the beach, she waved him out of his thoughts (twisting the water free from her hair). Leif recognised her and could tell with only the faintest peripheral gaze, with his eyes locked into hers, that she was wearing only bikini bottoms.
A cormorant against the sun, light-drinking pinions the colour of silence, basks on a shelf out of Leif’s reach. Water drops from here to the foot of a cave beneath the overhang, but what could be above, behind the lip of the bird’s perch - a stone bowl penthouse where coralyn salties and naiads bathe while practising their harmonies (their Hanon scales), a volcanic mouth sealed with tank traps from the breakwater beneath the fort, a naturally formed ocarina that blows and resonates a choral hum woven with tones of every available human who chooses not to speak out of reverence for an anticipated soundtrack of grace to accompany a slideshow of limitless war, a simple lookout, a stage.
Leif wasn’t sure if he sensed any embarrassment from Katita in her state of undress or whether it was all on his side, his standard self-consciousness pouring forth, for she surely held her composure well, with a measured pride even. He only took his eyes from hers to look out at the sea and then directly back to the pools beneath her brows. It’s okay, she smiled, relax, you can look, and he didn’t want to be rude, so he looked down and then back up and turned beet red, goofy grin. Katita’s friend called out from a picnic towel encampment, they were meeting some guys at the baths soon, would Leif would like to join, ah maybe later, he jumbles words (and half bows?) and keeps on, alone.
Necklacing mantle escarpment takes him around the bluff, although as he elevates so do the waves. Sandy platforms on this raised level are another beach above the first. When Leif’s Symphony Number Zero was performed in his early thirties, a door opened onto a hallway of infinities. Ten years on, working on his Fifth, the infinite is a dwindling expanse that only finds pause when he a) falls in partial love with somnambulant women, b) hallucinates musical revelation, c) forgets he is a man on the earth. Come sun, peer through overlapping projector slides of memory, embolden his skin. Leif loses his shirt - it rises like a kite untethered (a flag of convenience).
Handel’s Water Music and a panpipe version of Annie’s Song by John Denver are cornerstone musical memories from Leif’s youth (both in D Major) - the former its technical elegance, starbright still after centuries of replay; the latter how the sounds filled him, all of not yet out of primary school, with solitudinal pining for inexact love. Recollection of a double date a decade later - car licence ink still wet from the registration bureau, he and a mate, both wearing black, standing in a service station backlot with two beautiful girls, both wearing white, like pieces on a chessboard, rules of geometry restricting movement. The cormorant drags a shadow out to sea.
The tideglass ocean veils defragmented shimmer, white moving pixels on crests, cove drawn now as Leif mounts a quartz dune that fans up and against the cliff, a vertical beach that disorients his footing. Wind shuffles the wall of sand into ambient variations of Katita playing out imagined domestic postures - watering lamb’s ear, pivoting to a caravan, nestling the zeitgeist. His feet hold up well as he forms a suspension bridge between grain and crag, although not his shorts which tear on a sawtooth rail from the old coal line. He leaves them behind, sure that nobody will meet him out here what with sea levels rising, besides he can fashion a loincloth from coastal rosemary (Westringia fruticosa) if the end of history isn’t done yet.
Against the upright beach is a boulder the size of a train carriage, levitated here by ancient communal forces, men of a certain generation, that presents Leif with a significant disadvantage to progress: it must be ascended, which he tries, fingers in divets, soles convexed, blue eyes warbling now as his nerve loosens. Oh man, he’s frozen. Perhaps to look down, sharp rockfall and deep ocean, good, that makes things worse. Leif thinks about the canon of Western sound, Baroque to Romantic, to regain composure. Why this trajectory (sideways music) - in school, he liked Beethoven instead of Metallica, as if making the better choice, but why not something beyond this narrative, to make Ludwig the dud choice, something that surpasses the best of all possible worlds.
This is where Leif falls (Da Capo al Fine). The sound his naked body makes is recognisable as both single-toned, a crystalline plop, and multidimensional, all possible variations of sound roaring into a cavalcade of reasons he walked away from Katita after she asked him to swim. He’d rather transmute the memory into music, that’s how he’s always done things - a song is a landscape with all the people removed, a blueprint for how to fashion a kiss in a state of suspended animation, beyond the mess of real-time: look at the way Katita embraces him now, beneath wave collapse and signal fade, heart sonar, her body a mass of bubbles. It’s okay, she smiles, relax, you can look, and he closes his eyes as light trembles to a perfect pitch.