Beautiful Music

There are people who hear music when no music is playing.

Because music is sometimes an illusion to some people does that mean music is always an illusion to everyone?

Does it mean the experience of an illusion can present consciousness with something indistinguishable by consciousness from the nuts-and-bolts reality outside us all?

*

“It’s pretty, isn’t it?” she asks.

I ask, “Isn’t what pretty?”

“That music,” she says. “Someone must have a radio on. It’s amazing anyone is listening to orchestral music these days.”

She is gentle and smart and beautiful and I love her.

I hear only wind and traffic and somewhere in the distance a train.

She is gentle and smart and beautiful and I love her.

She lives in a world my telescopes can’t see, my computer programs can’t approximate, my thinking and writing and drawing and love can never share.

I say, “It’s beautiful music.”