Beautiful Place

from Triptych for Music

Only one beautiful place, says music as it thrums

chords to itself. When I think of the beautiful place

I imagine it with Schubert. No one comes

and no one goes in the great organic palace,

everyone is alone. My parents are asleep

somewhere in the cellars, and the wind slips

through rooms several storeys deep.

I’m in the earth with them. Something grips

my heart. A violin is scribbling light

over the dark floor. These images are

pointless, I know. Music has no need

of what we say or think about it. Tonight

my mother is dead for the twenty-fifth year.

Schubert tiptoes through the house as I read.

GEORGE SZIRTES

The Piano

The last bus sighs through the stops of the sleeping suburb

and he's home again with a click of keys, a step on the stairs.

I see him again, shut in the upstairs sitting-room

in that huge Oxfam overcoat, one hand shuffling

through the music, the other lifting the black wing.

My light's out in the room he was born in. In the hall

the clock clears its throat and counts twelve hours

into space. His scales rise, falter and fall back –

not easy to fly on one wing, even for him

with those two extra digits he was born with.

I should have known there’d be music as he flew, singing,

and the midwife cried out, ‘Magic fingers!’ A small variation,

born with more, like obsession. They soon fell,

tied like the cord, leaving a small scar fading

on each hand like a memory of flight.

Midnight arpeggios, Bartók, Schubert. I remember,

kept in after school, the lonely sound of a piano lesson

through an open window between-times, sun on the lawn

and everyone gone, the piece played over and over

to the metronome of tennis. Sometimes in the small hours,

after two, the hour of his birth, I lose myself listening

to that little piece by Schubert, perfected in the darkness

of space where the stars are so bright they cast shadows,

and I wait for that waterfall of notes, as if

two hands were not enough.