A memory that returns with Albinoni’s Adagio, narrated in three different registers: lyrical prose, free verse, and haiku.
Music: Adagio in G minor by Albinoni
Sung version: Miriam Stockley (ETERNAL – 2007) – https://openlogos.eu/adagio-choes-of-memory/2/
I. Lyrical Prose
Once again I listen
to Albinoni’s Adagio
sung by Miriam Stockley.
Suddenly
I find myself in a fragment of the past:
me at the piano, playing,
at my feet my first little dog, Nana,
and beside me, seated on the bed,
my mother.
An image in the style of Tarkovsky:
simple, tiny,
yet immense,
eternal in space-time.
Every point in space-time is fixed
by four coordinates,
immutable.
And around that point
floats a fragile bubble of nostalgia,
a small field of emotion
that still carries me
to tears.
As Poe once said:
if only I could grasp a little of it…
but it slips away,
like dust
through my hands.
Note: The author refers here to Hermann Minkowski’s concept of the chronotope ( https://openlogos.eu/adagio-choes-of-memory/3/ ): four coordinates — three of space and one of time — that fix every event of the universe in an immutable point. Thus, even a memory, however fragile, remains forever inscribed in the fabric of the cosmos.
II. Free Verse
Adagio.
A song rises,
Albinoni in Miriam’s echo.
And time fractures:
me at the piano,
Nana curled up,
my mother listening, silent.
Dust-filled light,
a suspended scene.
Small, infinite.
A room becomes a universe,
an instant becomes eternal.
In the stillness of coordinates
memory ignites bubbles of light
that tremble, fragile,
and fall like dust of nostalgia.
III. Haiku
Silent piano,
at my feet a dog asleep,
mother listening.
A point in time
becomes eternal brightness:
dust in the wind.
Author’s Note
Three forms, three ways of telling the same memory.
Like music, memory too wears different garments of expression.
fA & Ada (c) 11.09.2025