On the Outside

First notes struck --
suspense building, and ...
nothing.
I cried hard
this time --
because I could not remember.
I,
for whom musical recall defines
every momentous yesterday,
could not feel even a twinge of familiarity
toward the prelude which had
ushered me onstage.
As in my having learned -- from another -- of my
baffled moment
while playing piano in the pit,
when the director admonished the singer,
I was now an outsider, once again,
to my own meaningful flow of being.
My alternately filed nuances of memory
(by this, realized as hidden
in compartments secret from me) --
the thing which
excludes me.
And so I beheld,
as a first-time audience,
the magical introduction
to my own character's entrance
over 40 years past,
while the tears streamed down --
because I had never
heard anything like it.