I just love this poem.  I hope my daughter will also see my great love for the piano and respect it as something reverent.

The Ebony Chickering

by Dorianne Laux

My mother cooked with lard she kept
In coffee cans beneath the kitchen sink.
Bean-colored linoleum ticked under her flats
as she wore a path from stove to countertop.
Eggs cracked against the lips of smooth
ceramic bowls she beat muffins in,
boxed cakes and cookie dough.
It was the afternoons she worked toward,
the smell of onions scrubbed from her hands,
when she would fold her flowered apron
and feed it through the sticky refrigerator
handle, adjust the spongy curlers on her head
and wrap a loud Hawaiian scarf into a tired knot
around them as she walked toward her piano,
the one thing my father had given her that she loved.

I can still see each gold letter engraved
on the polished lid she lifted and slid
into the piano’s dark body, the hidden hammers
trembling like a muffled word,
the scribbled sheets, her rough hands poised
above the keys as she began her daily practice.
Words like arpeggio sparkled through my childhood,
her fingers sliding from the black bar of a sharp
to the white of a common note. “This is Bach,”
she would instruct us, the tail of his name hissing
like a cat. “And Chopin,” she said, “was French,
like us,” pointing to the sheet music. “Listen.
Don’t let the letters fool you. It’s best
to always trust your ear.”

She played parts of fugues and lost concertos,
played hard as we kicked each other on the couch,
while the meat burned and the wet wash wrinkled
in the basket, played Beethoven as if she understood
the caged world of the deaf, his terrible music
pounding its way through the fence slats
and teh screened doors of the cul-de-sac, the yards
where other mothers hung clothes on a wire, bent
to weeds, swept the driveways clean.
Those were the years she taught us how to make
quick easy meals, accept the embarrassment
of a messy house, safety pins and rick-rack
hanging from the hem of her dress.
But I knew the other kids didn’t own words
like fortissimo and mordant, treble clef
and trill, or have a mother quite as elegant
as mine when she sat at th epiano,
playing like she was famous,
so that when the Sparklets man arrived
to fill our water cooler every week
he would lean against the doorjamb and wait
for her to finish, glossy-eyed
as he listened, secretly touching the tips
of his fingers to the tips of her fingers
as he bowed, and she slipped him the check.

Muse

by Linda Pastan

No angel speaks to me.
And though the wind
plucks the dry leaves
as if they were so many notes
of music, I can hear no words.

Still, I listen. I search
the feathery shapes of clouds
hoping to find the curve of a wing.
And sometimes, when the static
of the world clears just for a moment

a small voice comes through,
chastening. Music
is its own language, it says.
Along the indifferent corridors
of space, angels could be hiding.

I’ve posted a few poems about music over the last couple weeks.  A reader asked where I find them, and I thought I would share the book in a post since it’s Poetry Month!  (That’s what they tell me at the library, anyway.)

The book is called “The Music Lover’s Poetry Anthology,” edited by Helen Handley Houghton and Maureen McCarthy Draper. My favorite chapters are Listening to Music and Piano and Piano Lessons. But it also has poems about singing, horns, woodwinds, strings, opera, jazz & blues, and more. It’s a great coffee table book!

This poem made me laugh out loud

Piano Tuner,
Untune Me That Tune

Ogden Nash

I regret that before people can be reformed they have to be
sinners,
And that before you have pianists in the family you have
to have beginners.
When it comes to beginners’ music
I am not enthusic.
When listening to something called “An Evening in My Doll
House,” or “Buzz, Buzz, Said the Bee to the Clover,”
Why I’d like just once to hear it played all the way through,
instead of that hard part near the end over and over.
Have you noticed about little fingers?
When they hit a sour note, they lingers.
and another thing about little fingers, they are always
strawberry-jammed or cranberry-jellied-y,
And “Chopsticks” is their favorite melody,
And if there is one man who I hope his dentist was a
sadist and all his teeth were brittle ones,
It is he who invented “Chopsticks” for the little ones.
My good wishes are less than frugal
For him who started the little ones going boogie-woogal,
But for him who started the little ones picking out
“Chopsticks” on the ivories,
Well I wish him a thousand harems of a thousand wives
apiece, and a thousand little ones by each wife, and each
little one playing “chopsticks” twenty-four hours a day
in all the nurseries of all his harems, or wiveries.

In Music
by, Czeslaw Milosz

Wailing of a flute, a little drum.
A small wedding cortege accompanies a couple
Going past clay houses in the street of a village.
In the dress of the bride much white satin.
How many renunciations to sew it, once in a lifetime.
The dress of the groom black, festively stiff.
The flute tells something of the hills, parched, the color of deer.
Hens scratch in dry mounds of manure.

I have not seen it, I summoned it listening to music.
The instruments play for themselves, in their own eternity.
Lips blow, agile fingers work, so short a time.
Soon afterward the pageant sinks into the earth.
But the sound endures, autonomous, triumphant,
Forever visited by, each time returning,
The warm touch of cheeks, interiors of houses,
And particular human lives
Of which the chronicles make no mention.

When was the last time you listened to music like this?  If you’re like me, it’s been a long time since you allowed yourself to sit down and be completely absorbed in listening to a beautiful piece of music.  I’m going to schedule some time today for a good listen.  What about you?

I came across this lovely quote from Charles Darwin

If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once a week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would have thus been kept active through use.  The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

However you feel about Charles Darwin, you have to be happy with his point of view that the arts are vital to our well being and happiness!