Violin Read Online Free PDF

And this is my garden, and my roses crawl on these railings outside and we are in our grave too. We are here and we are there, and they are one.
    We are in the grave and we are in the house, and all else is a failure of imagination.
    In this soft rainy realm, where water sings as it falls from the darkening leaves, as the earth falls from the uneven edges above, I am the bride, the daughter, the mother, all those venerable titles forming for me the precious claims I lay upon myself.
    I have you always! Never never to let you leave me, never never to go away.
    All right. And so we made a mistake again. So we played our game. So we nudged at madness as if it were a thick door and then we slammed against it, like they slammed against Karl’s door, but the door of madness didn’t break, and that uncharted grave is the dream.
    Well, I can hear his music through it.
    I don’t even think they hear it. This is my voice in my head and his violin is his voice out there, and together we keep the secret, that this grave is my vision, and that I can’t really be with you now, my dead ones. The living need me.
    The living need me now, need me so, as they always need the bereaved after the death, so needy of those who have nursed the most, and sat the longest in the stillness, so needy with questions and suggestions and assertions and declarations, and papers to be signed. They need meto look up at the strangest smiles and find some way to receive with grace the most awkward sympathies.
    But I’ll come in time. I’ll come. And when I do, the grave will hold us all. And the grass will grow above all of us.
    Love and love and love I give you—let the earth grow wet. Let my living limbs sink down. Give me skulls like stones to press against my lips, give me bones to hold in my fingers, and if the hair is gone—like fine spun silk, it does not matter. Long hair I have to shroud all of us, isn’t that so. Look at it, this long hair. Let me cover us all.
    Death is not death as I once thought, when fear was trampled underfoot. Broken hearts do best forever beating upon the wintry windowpane.
    Hold me, hold me, hold me here. Let me never never tarry in another place.
    Forget the fancy lace, the deftly painted walls, the gleaming inlay of the open desk. The china that they take with such care now, piece by piece, to place now all over the table, cups and saucers ornamented with blue lace and gold. Karl’s things. Turn around. Don’t feel these living arms.
    The only thing important about coffee being poured from a silver spout is the way that the early light shines in it; the way that the deep brown of the coffee becomes amber and gold and yellow, and twists and turns like a dancer as it fills the cup, then stops, like a spirit snatched back into the pot.
    Go back to where the garden breaks to ruin. You will find us all together. You will find us there.
    From memory, a perfect picture: twilight: the Garden District Chapel; Our Mother of Perpetual Help; our little church within an old mansion. You have only to walk a block from my front gate to reach it. It is on PrytaniaStreet. The tall windows are full of pink light. There are low guttering candles in red glass before a saint with a smiling face whom we love and revere as “The Little Flower.” The darkness is like dust in this place. You can still move through it.
    Mother and my sister Rosalind and I kneel at the cold marble Altar Rail. We lay down our bouquets—little flowers picked here and there from walls, through iron fences like our own—the wild bridal wreath, the pretty blue plumbago, the little gold and brown lantana. Never the gardeners’ blooms. Only the loose tangle no one might miss from a viny gate. These are our bouquets, and we have nothing to bind them with, save our hands. We lay our bouquets on the Altar Rail, and when we make the Sign of the Cross and say our prayers, I get a doubt.
    “Are you sure that the Blessed Mother and Jesus will get these