All along, he was memorizing Handel
The way he taught himself to worship
Fullness, Alberti bass,
That perfect wrong chord with one
Too many G sharps.
The way I breathed through his wax paper lungs
And tanning baby skin,
When all sorts of chemical molasses
Was prying open my window, playing
At airborne thievery
To snatch away
A pianist’s only fiction.
Ink always stretched for him, satisfied with drying;
Complacent in acting substitute
Nurse for a night or two.
He would gaze with chronic wonder
At wobbly bar lines, sloppy dotted eighths:
Our childhood disease never left off her tyranny
On the lichen-soft rug
Of his curly European hair.
What am I supposed to capture, then,
That could possibly be so secret,
So capricious,
As the way he plays with scherzo?
I guard – overmuch – his elbows
So fond of suspended animation
And hard counter top surfaces.
You’re too much a dancer for Clementi,I’ll mutter,
Knowing all the while he could make Schumann
Disapprove of me, punish me
And my fake pluviophile poetics; never give
A father’s blessing
To that sort of accusatory motion-picture composer
Who should’ve been a violinist.
But he’ll cry, just for comfort, as he pounds out
Another diminished seventh,
And keep his toddler wishes spiraling and winging
Their hawk’s way up to the gilded, yellowing moon;
I will be everything but pleased
With scribbling only the woolliest words
To settle cloak-like
Over his stooped, shaking shoulders.