The Landscape of the Piano

is a winter. Snow stays on the plain but melts
off the hot backs of the mountains.

We travel. Ice is everywhere and there are temples
full of strange singing. We have caravanned, looking up.
We enter a wood and vanish into the grain.

      •

In the heart of the piano, the strung back,
there is rain slanting down in glitters

and the air between the strands of rain
sings of Birth and Love and Death

and everything other: what we are.
But oh, say the sceptics, now can it

rain in a box? Until they open it, and
their faces stream with tears.


To Play Pianissimo

Does not mean silence,
the absence of moon in the day sky
for example.

Does not mean barely to speak,
the way a child's whisper
makes only warm air
on his mother's right ear.

To play pianissimo
is to carry sweet words
to the old woman in the last dark row
who cannot hear anything else,
and to lay them across her lap like a shawl.


Fortissimo

To play fortissimo
hold something back.

It is what the father does not say
that turns the son.

The fact that the summit cannot be seen
that drives the climber on.

Consider the graceless ones:
the painter who adds one more brush stroke.

the poet of least resistance
who writes past the end of his poem.