print previewback ADAM CHILES
Fauré
My father would turn the volume up, lifting
his breakfast spoon at intervals, a kind of conductor,
I suppose, the choir beginning to rise in him again
like a flotilla of darkly lit balloons. At least
that’s how I remembered those mornings, years later,
lost in the mundane labor of another country,
mostly failing at my life. I liked to think of him
sat there, consumed by the music building
through the still early hour of that room,
while my mother took to the garden once more,
annoyed no doubt by how loud it had become.
Which is to say, an ordinary morning
in the middle of their lives, where I was a child,
and the house an isle of incalculable light. 