Do I Get Milk and Cookies After I Practice?

I have begun taking piano lessons from my daughter's teacher. This ought to be interesting. Yes, it is slightly weird sitting down with another adult and playing "Camptown Races" or "Yankee Doodle." But I am already enjoying it.

My Daughter’s Piano Lesson

Her back is turned to me

A small Asian beauty in black.

Straddling the bench at the ominous grand. 

A concentrate of my daughter’s face

Behind her in a shiver of light.

Alone, it is just the two of them now,

And they work.

Well, it is I that brought her here,

I say to myself,

Sinking in the sofa in a darkening room,

Apart, and pay the monstrous fee.

I have been undone by small chores

I think, as if dishes were not done too

By elites of discipline I never could muster

And now on the outside looking in, never will.  

They work.

Not just piano but pianissimo

Through the hour made long

By the early winter dark

And the repetitions of “softer, softer….”

She is learning, my daughter, from the heir

Of an ancient dynasty, the world is nuanced,

Infinite in believable interpretations

If only you are trained to summon them,

And having summoned, can believe in them,

And by belief give reason to believe.

But that, I suppose, is for the advanced.

We once saw the teacher in a recital hall

Seduce the Brandenburg from a harpsichord

So that we thought it might get up—

I mean the music itself!—climb into the seats

And shake hands with us.

                                           

 They work until the hour winds down

 And the teacher releases her back to me

We look alike, it’s said, and I do bear

The ghost in my face of the child

My daughter will soon cease to be.

Cease, for I know now in that hour

One of the ways of becoming

Someone other than who she might

Have to be, has been slipped

Into her fingers like a code.

And already as we head to the door

She has become less mine, more her own,

Than she was before.