Piano tuner
Your hands were the last
to stroke the dust
from my yellowing keys,
to lift my inlaid panels with
long-fingered practised ease.
In dreams I feel your palms slide down
my scarred and creaking walnut sides—
and so I plot to loosen
strings, unwind my hair,
let slack wires call you back
before your neatly lettered time,
bringing your case of instruments
to tweak the pins at the very tip
top of my ageing iron frame.
Shall I compare your lovemaking
to a Chopin étude? Or the slow
movement of a Beethoven sonata?
As I grow old I prefer to make love
largo: when I was young I assumed
it was always the Minute Waltz
or perhaps a swift rondo—
but more important than these jokes
are the notes you touch inside
me, like lights, or bells that glow.
And in the darkness wires thrum
as hands play chords in six-four time;
your pedalling grows loose
and mingles runs of accidental joy.
The artist’s prayer
Vouchsafe me the slender grey heron,
the elder raining stars upon my head,
the beech that lands its leaf among my pages,
seeds that sprout when hope is dead.
Vouchsafe me the unexpected: lead me
along unfamiliar paths. Let me find joy
in tangled hair, a slant of light. Vouchsafe me
hours of grace and sleepless nights.
Let me not presume to know
what’s right and good and true. Let me sin
and sin again. Vouchsafe me doubt and darkness,
to grow like moss or mushrooms. Grant me love,
if only for a while: vouchsafe me
another’s soul—or, if that cannot be,
their breath and smile. Let me be kind, yet
unyielding. Most of all, let me have faith.
This poem was inspired by Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way (1992); line 7 alludes to Emily Dickinson’s ‘There’s a certain Slant of light, (320)’.