All day, I feel the throbbing
of other lives, other pain,
as if I’m a string on the piano
that goes unplayed, and yet
vibrates when the hammer
strikes other strings, and then—
your ache, my ache,
two strings, one song.
Posts Tagged ‘piano’
Sympathetic Resonance
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged compassion, connection, love, pain, piano, resonance on August 2, 2023| 12 Comments »
Dear Ludwig,
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Beethoven, love, piano, role model on December 16, 2022| 5 Comments »
Before I knew of you,
I knew your music.
When I turned the flat metal handle
of my pale pink jewelry box,
Für Elise would play as a ballerina
in a white tutu would spin and spin
and I would hum along
until the music slowed
into garish metallic plinks.
Part of me envied Elise—
that someone would write her
such a beautiful song.
Now I know you wrote it for Therese,
a woman you wanted to marry,
but in transcription
your handwriting was misspelt,
and the error lasts to this day.
And Therese, she had no interest
in marrying you.
Oh, Ludwig, I, too, know
how the heart sometimes longs
for what it will never have.
I know how our words are twisted
till they plink, till they plunk.
I know how mistakes
sometimes stay with us forever.
What I meant to say is Happy Birthday,
Thank you for daring to love
even when it hurt.
Thank you for transforming your pain
and rejection into music so relevant
that 250 years later its played
as cell phone ring tones.
Thank you for teaching me
as a girl how to hum along—
for giving me the reason
to turn that flat metal handle
again and again and again.
Anti-Lamentation
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged brokenness, grief, music, piano, record player on February 26, 2022| 11 Comments »
There was that summer
when my record player broke,
the needle always returning
to the first song and playing
the whole record again and again,
through morning, through midnight,
and so George Winston’s Winter into Spring
played all through my summer.
Soft and pensive, each melodic phrase
hung spare in the air as if inviting
revelation or breath
before burbling forward like snowmelt.
How I loved that summer,
every moment of it kissed
with chords shattered into arpeggios,
silences and grace notes.
Sometimes breaking brings a gift
we didn’t know we needed,
the way a broken record player
steeped me for months
in the grace of a melancholic beauty
and made the haunting familiar.
The way a broken heart can bring up
a record of beautiful memories,
one after another, day after day,
and somehow heal us by making a masterpiece
of the wreckage.
One Rusty
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bird, perfectionism, piano, poem, poetry on July 8, 2019| Leave a Comment »
stumbling through
the Moonlight Sonata
while outside the window
a twilight birdsong—
not one note out of place
One Conversation that Didn’t Happen
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged conversation, music, piano, poem, poetry on December 8, 2018| Leave a Comment »
A Request, Of Sorts
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged intimacy, piano, poem, poetry, song, touch on July 14, 2017| 4 Comments »
Dear Erik Satie,
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged amazement, erik satie, piano, poem, poetry on June 14, 2016| 3 Comments »
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.
Almost Sad in their Fantastic Costumes
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged debussy, failure, moon, piano, poem, poetry, suite bergamasque on February 23, 2016| 1 Comment »
Votre âme est un paysage choisi / Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques / Jouant du luth et dansant et quasi / Tristes sous leurs déguisements fantasques.
—Paul Verlaine, “Claire de Lune”
I hate the way my fingers stumble
through the prelude—in my ear,
it is beautiful, the phrases open
and flowing, and I hum sincerely, as if
with song I could make my hands
more nimble. There are fields,
golden, inside the arpeggios,
and they part as if the wind has blown
a place for a path, and then
a thousand thousand birds
take flight just before night—
or at least that is what I
want to hear. But I am clumsy,
an oxen trampling in the field
who trips in every irrigation ditch.
I have read that by the time
the suite was published, Debussy
hated the sound of it, deplored
his earlier style. I try to imagine him
here in the living room, his thin moustache,
his thick black bangs, oh how
he would cringe, revile my lack
of sensitivity. And how I would hate
to disappoint him. Both of us
miserable, both of us abhorring
what we hear—I would stop playing,
I would, and walk over to him
as he scoffed, and I would say,
Look, look Claude,
how the moon is full, so large there
on the horizon. And we’d step
out onto the porch.
There would be no birds,
no wind to part the field,
and he would slip his hand
toward the moon, and say,
There, there, that is what I was trying to say.
And I would let my empty hands
play.
Liederkreis, Opus 24
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Liederkreis, music, piano, poem, poetry, Schumann, singing, song on September 17, 2013| 1 Comment »
Cosi e’, se vi pare
(That’s the way it is, if it seems that way to you)
—Italian saying
Under my fingers,
the chords are familiar,
allegretto, in 2/4 time.
I lean into the ritardandos,
swelling the passing tensions,
failing to remember to exhale.
The lyrics, perhaps because
they are in German,
are beautiful. I can forget
that they speak of sleepless
nights and helplessness,
and dreams that languish
unfulfilled. My voice drifts
into the rafters. What
do I know of dreams?
There is so much I do not know.
Even this life I call my own.
What do I know of it?
Who taught them to sing,
the birds in autumn?
Who taught them to dance,
the leaves? Tonight, I do not see them,
the shadows my voice moves through
as I follow the staffs in front of me.
Nor do I think of translation. Nor
do I think of who is listening,
nor of who is not. For now,
there is Schumann and Heine,
there is this voice that is borrowing me,
there is this song that says
it must be sung.
Dusting the Piano
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged love, memory, music, piano, poem, poetry on June 29, 2013| 1 Comment »
The best part, of course,
is dusting the keys, sliding
the damp rag
from top to bottom, from high
notes to low,
over the blacks and into
the valleys of the smooth
long whites, how
a showering of music then
fills the room.
I nearly wish there were
more work
to do. Sometimes I forget there
is joy to be found in just touching
a thing, though
I have touched it a thousand
thousand times
before. How the skin meets it
anew. Sometimes I forget that
I know what
a hand can do, oh the smooth
of it, oh
the slide, the skim, the skate of it,
oh the slipping,
the flutter, the long and longing
(remember?) glide.