Thank you for the Gnossienne No.2,
and for the directions
you wrote above the staves.
“With amazement,” you wrote,
at the start of the piece.
That is what I told my hands
as they bumbled tonight
through the melody.
Thank you for the melody.
Just today I saw
with amazement the four plover eggs
still intact in the nest,
though I could tell
by the wet silt around them
that the high water
had covered them.
My friend said she thought
they might not hatch.
I watched as the mother plover
ran at the river’s edge,
pretending she had a broken wing,
attempting to distract us.
“I think they will hatch,”
I said, though the words were said more
out of longing than belief.
Sometimes longing
is all we have.
“Don’t leave,”
you wrote in the score.
That’s what I thought
later today when
I saw the lonesome
duckling in the pond—
no mother, no father,
no other baby ducks.
I longed to be a mother duck,
to know what a baby duck
might need.
As it is, I gave it space,
knowing sometimes
giving space
is the most generous thing
we can do.
I do not want space.
Tonight I saw a picture
of my friend with her newborn girl,
both of them naked,
skin to skin. That
is what I want.
“With great kindness,”
you say, and that
is the way I want to live
this song of life—
in amazement and with
great kindness—to know
myself as the kind of melody
that might be played
poorly and still sound
beautiful because
the hands that played me
did it “lightly, with intimacy,”
though the keys keep changing
though the timing is unmarked,
though the song doesn’t end
anywhere near where it begins.
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