Scale Practice

UT (Dominus)

Now, you cannot even remember

what a white thick moon I was, father,

when you threw me onto your shoulders

to plant me above your head.

The Mass, the song, the ivory simplicity

of sharing a hymnbook, your finger

tracing the stanza for me, the God-honest

arpeggio of it all, tapping our feet,

eating communion because we were hungry.

How much clearer we heard then.

RE

He didn’t start a fire that morning,

and I ran my hands under warm water

to loosen the blood. All I knew then

were whole notes on a C scale,

I pushed thumb index middle—under—

thumb index middle ring pinky

filling the whole house with four-second o’s

so simple in the cold morning.

He came up, then, to make breakfast

and wrapped something white around

me, rubbed my hands, and wondered

at the new blue veins.

MI

Gershwin now, filling the living room

with his crazy little tangles of blue

yarn, variations on the hungry speed

of light, no single meter. My father

lying glassy-eyed on the couch,

his arm over his eyes, silent between

the songs. We like that—the pause

in the room. When I could have said

so much at 528 hertz, when I wanted

to ask if he’d followed the pathways

of Gershwin’s theme. He cannot hear the bones

coming through my fingers now,

he will not look over and say

good god, how thin you’re getting.

Let us break bread now and sing.

FA

After my Bartók concert—two beers,

and the man opened like an aria.

He’s talking oscillators and hairsprings,

the genius of Peter Henlein,

a whole vocabulary of time

history, so goddamned glad

that somebody’s changing it up

a little bit after the predictable

heartbeat of the clocks he’s built.

I nod—yes, this rhythm—

and suddenly his whole face is red,

and seeing him clench his fists,

I show him my jawbone, let him

punch me in his triple meter.

The escapement, he says, controls

the measured release of energy.

Otherwise the hands would simply spin.

SOL

Whole sonatas now in the half hours of hunger,

Beethoven’s same sentence of violence,

punctuated, written in the deaf

morning, then again at two and three.

And in his Largo, Apassionato—

forgetting the stupidity of the body,

the cold house, the white sheet,

the fingers, fists, hands.

Listening like that composer,

head bent just above the keys,

we learn everything we need to know

about deafness, that graceful disappearance

of taste and touch,

the decrescendo of our bodies.

LA

After the funeral, it’s simple.

He left the white sheet in a square

on the couch. With Rachmaninoff

muscled in the memory

of my fingers, I unfold it,

billow it out across the room

and overtop the black monster in the living

room, our old plagal cadence of whoosh,

fall. Be silent, I say. He is sleeping.