If music is the sound between
I. If music is the sound between
the notes,
then the knot is the closeness between the strands.
The knot is not of the string.
When the ends can be found and the center can be freed
you might find that it is not there at all. The knot does not exist.
What magic trick is this?
The simple knot is a string’s final perfect form.
Physicists have studied at length
how all knots, if separate from one another, remain
separate
unless placed in proximity into the same drawer.
Then they form one knot again.
Leave any of us alone in the dark
& we, too, will twist into knots.
II.
It was my father who taught me music is the sound between the notes. What, then— of the staccato of water while wading with fishing rods into the stream? Of early mornings filled with birdsong?
Of the minds of women who laugh between sorrows?
What of the hush that lies between family secrets housed in boxes, stacked away
that our loved ones will one day sort for us
only to find them
full of knots?
It was on my own that I learned that a knot is the kinship between the strands. Find the ends & begin the unraveling. Begin to free the heart of it & find the knot no longer exists,
find your hands
suddenly empty.
III.
Yes. I think it must have been my father who taught me the sound between notes was something called music. About the vast spaces between a scolding & a screaming match. About the fear trembling like a cymbal
between shirts hanging in a closet hiding a hiding child.
Of the fear that ripples between hands covering the ears.
IV.
I really think it might have been my father who taught me how time is the invisible structure that holds our happenings. How events can be rearranged or swapped out like pairs of shoes. How you can exchange lies for truth & fill gaps with them like insulation, the way birds stuff paper into nests to keep out the draft. Piece for piece, forming the same life again & again
& find all roads leading to the same grave,
find that the obituary always reads the same.
I may have learned on my own, but probably with some help, that a knot is the constraint between the strands. Find the edges & push, don’t pull— that causes tightening. The goal is to loosen; to unravel gently to free the heart of it from its own tight-fisted grasp; to find it no longer there.
The knot does not exist.
Find it is only air.
One day, after you disappeared, I walked around plucking the sky.
Beautiful silence,
everywhere I searched.
V.
My father taught me that if you smash the notes like dishes heaved at the wall, it’s one way to make a point mid argument.
That there isn’t any music between the shatterings—
only pieces of something that a nostalgic likes to call a childhood.
In the same way that we form deep bonds
with ordinary things, in our minds made special
by virtue of being ours
& nothing more romantic than that.
That may be all he taught me of music :
the silence
when he tried to teach me to play guitar / the tambourine / drums / to sing.
When I asked if I could see the sheet music, he replied that he didn’t know how to read music, that he could simply hear it,
couldn’t I hear it?
For years, I strained my ear listening for the music between family secrets,
muffled where the notes are merely mumbled whispers stuffed in pockets, stowed away,
packed in boxes, then stacked in shadow towers in basements.
VI.
I learned that breakthroughs are lubricated by flood damage.
I think I learned this from my mother’s tears
catalyzed by a broken sump pump that caused the deluge
that floated things to the surface.
A broken pipe.
A faucet left on, overflowing the bathtub.
A heavy rain that washed the backyard into our home
through a tiny solitary window.
It could have been anything
that made soup of too small clothing
of shoe boxes of photographs
of evidence of family life
constructed of the people we once were.
of the images we hold onto / outgrow /
wince at the sight of / would rather not face /
remember with pride
by virtue of having been them; of them having been us— nothing more.
Maybe it makes sense when he says, I don’t want you to see me like this.
Maybe we all want to be remembered as someone we tried so hard to be / only managed for mere moments, sandwiched between years of not-our-proudest-moments, that in between the waiting to become, tied itself together to form the knot that we call identity.
VII.
It isn’t wrong to want to remember my mother’s voice & simply let that be enough. To hold on
to that long-ago sound
amid the music-less silence with no attempt to reconstruct your memories
in a present where you clear out your father’s belongings. All that useful space to be reclaimed.
Somewhere in the breaths between the grief
a child untangles the desperate fiction healing over the gaps in memories
she sits in an empty room reconstructed from a closet,
composing something.
Remember those songs your mother sang whose words you never paid much attention to, then found later they had formed the synapses of your psyche anyway— how they were the foundational beliefs between the independent thoughts?
Perhaps I don’t give her enough credit—
it’s true, my mother also taught me
things.
VIII.
It was my mother who taught me how to present my body to the male gaze. The yoga of how to breathe while sucking it in,
those softer parts.
How to make the bones stick out artfully.
How red can glisten like gold in the bright light of the stage. How bruises can be maquillage. How to remain soft despite pretending you’re not just doing what you’re taught again and again long after the encore.
How smiles are a performance we call womanly arts.
When she got up on stage the visions of thinness became the hiding between the reflections of the dancing spotlight on her teeth. Eyes closed, mouth agape, crooning into the microphone like kissing a tender lover, were all a form of both hiding & allowing of men’s eyelashes to strike her face, which my father hardly noticed, did not protect her from.
IX.
It was sometime around then that I learned that delusion is the denial of the existence of the hands that grip the wrists leaving purple marks.
When I asked my mother about this, years later, she said
children misremember things.
Then why did I keep listening for the music as the sound between the thuds? Searching for acceptance to be the thing between the broken strings of disappointment left behind to be inherited like the family instrument & waiting
for the forgiveness to be the gift from the many steps trekked between childhood & the future & kept finding that knots continue forming
where they previously weren’t,
if you left the memories unattended;
that wounds can continue hurting
long after they’ve healed
to find that scar tissue is a form of binding, like a knot.
To find that your fingers must remain busy untying / unwinding / unsnarling / unperling / resolving / undoing it all with such impeccable devotion to maintain this spaciousness between the gossamer strands of lace of the life you don’t realize you’re weaving.
You cannot place the untangled knot into the same drawer with the rest
& shut it & simply walk away.
Svetlana Litvinchuk graduated from University of New Mexico. She is the author of a chapbook, Only a Season (Bottlecap Features, 2024) and a forthcoming full-length poetry collection (spring 2026). Nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net, her poetry appears in swamp pink, About Place, Flyway, Apple Valley Review, Sky Island Journal, Arkana, and elsewhere. She is the Associate Editor and Reviews Editor with ONLY POEMS and is serving as an Editor for Rockvale Review in 2025. Originally from Kyiv, Ukraine, she now tends her garden in Missouri. Find her on Instagram @s.litvinchuk or at www.svetlanalitvinchuk.com.
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