Traumerei

—like the afternoon with her spent listening

 to Horowitz roll his long fingers over the notes—

listen, like this—

as daylight swung through the trees

and her son slept on

and the blue dog leapt into its blue chair.

As before I was sent home to mimic

on piano what alone I wouldn’t perceive:

chords shapeshifting within chords, their drunken,

muddied bleed, then the crisp, clear song

of the dreamer’s reverie—this one note—broken

or turned sweetly inward, romance of self

with self, awareness stirred

to a plastic empathy.

                                               His hands,

she said, spreading

her own so wide the silk finger webs pearled, nearly twice the span

of a normal man’s. Listen—

as now the hardest chord is struck, two notes more

than the octave, a reach most have to roll or flub

to protect the joints’ knit,

dazzle the initiate’s ear, float away

                                               Later

there would be Horowitz’s death to learn about

and then my own, discipline, assassinations, sex

and geology, a love

so often frustrated by lack of work.

But then, listening, didn’t she close her eyes

and dream, perhaps, of the book

she’d never publish and the son

who would never get well?

While I, who have never wanted to be a musician,

assumed the dream of a life

no sorrow could touch, content to linger

within that distance between us.

Listen, she begins, how beautiful—

as the long, foreign fingers, long

dead, curl again over the impossible notes.