Inside the brick exterior of the sprawling waterfront building
is all wood: support structure, floors, walls—all huge all
old: beams and planks, columns and frames. The floors tend
to creak when you walk on them, or even just when
they feel like it. There are scars of the past memos nailed to pillars,
heavy equipment dragged across the floor; the wood still
resonates with the faint echo of spinning and weaving machines
that now labour on the other side of the world. Where there was once
a driving need to process cotton and ship it out, now there remains
the question of what comes next.

The graceful gleaming cello groans its sweet dreamscape
in a language that the floors walls and beams of the building
take up and retell, bringing the listeners into the soul of the music,
surrounding each, taking each heart inside the cello so that
every note expresses itself in colors, flavors, aromas, massaging
memory until it is persuaded to see again the transcendental
celestial spheres, singing in orbit around our pre-birth earth.