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.

A Conference in Hawaii

A conspiracy of intention brought the delegates together

To the mirrored halls of these meeting rooms

And the marble lobby with its water falls and stone statues

Of Island gargoyles designed to invoke
A colonial benevolence no one recalls.

It began in the conventional way.

The heat grew desperate in the rooms
Amid a panic of commitment,
Opposing positions took on a flesh
That seemed to walk among us,
And for a while it became possible to think
That our sullen flesh might soon be shorn  
For a new and unimaginably brilliant habitation.

But then from the 23^rd floor
A stick figure in black like a doodle by Kafka
Lofted a dove from its hands
That fluttered a while before it fell
Through a shaft of Hawaiian light,
Turning as it dropped into a clutter of littering confetti.
And when I looked up again
The earnest delegates and their forbearing wives,
Their motions and resolutions,
Were gone.