or seven, or ten.

I watched you grow

in foreign bodies.

Leaping into a pool, all laughter,

or frowning over a keyboard,

but mostly just standing,

taller each time.

How splendid your most

mundane action seemed

in these joyful proxies.

I often held back tears.

Now you are twenty-one.

Finally, it makes sense

that you have moved away

into your own afterlife.

MY HANDSOME COUSIN

I saw you in a dream last night—

Quiet and pale, but still my handsome cousin.

Your hair was thick and glossy black.

Your breath was earthy whispering in my ear.

“I’m not dead,” you told me. “I’ve been away.

I’ve come to show you the house I’ve bought.”

We walked together through the empty rooms.

Each one was smaller than the room before.

“And this,” you smiled, “will be the nursery.”

I thought of your children, now full-grown,

Who know you from old photographs,

And of your widow, beautiful but gray.

I wanted to ask where you had gone,

But you spoke first, “It’s time to go next door.

Let’s see the house that will be yours.”

• IV •

IMAGINATION

ELEGY FOR VLADIMIR DE PACHMANN

(Odessa, 1848–Rome, 1933)

“How absurd,” cried the pianist de Pachmann

to reporters from the Minneapolis Dispatch,

“that my talents or the talents of a Liszt

were confined to so small a planet

as the earth. How much more could we have done

given the dimensions of a fixed star?”

He began a prelude quietly, then stopped.

“Once Chopin could play this well. Now only me.”

When he brought his socks into the concert hall

and dedicated that night’s music to them,

or relearned his repertoire at sixty-nine

using only the fourth and fifth fingers

of one hand, the critics thought his madness

was theatrical, but the less learned

members of his audience, to whom he talked

while playing, knew the truth.

Porters and impresarios told of coming on him,

alone in a hotel suite, his back

curved like a monkey’s, dancing and screeching

in front of a dressing mirror,

or giving concerts for the velvet furniture

in his room, knocking it together afterwards

for applause. “Dear friends,” he whispered to it,

“such love deserves an encore.”

Now relegated to three short paragraphs

in Grove’s Dictionary of Music

and one out-of-stock recording of Chopin,

he reappears only by schedule

in a few selections broadcast on his birthday,

music produced by rolls on a mechanical piano

where no fingers touch the keys as each piece

goes to its predictable finale.

LIVES OF THE GREAT COMPOSERS

Herr Bruckner often wandered into church

to join the mourners at a funeral.

The relatives of Berlioz were horrified.

“Such harmony,” quoth Shakespeare, “is in

immortal souls…. We cannot hear it.” But

the radio is playing, and outside

rain splashes to the pavement. Now and then

the broadcast fails. On nights like these Schumann

would watch the lightning streak his windowpanes.

Outside the rain is falling on the pavement.