On Playing Ravel's Concerto for the Left Hand

Someone in the Green Room will always ask

Aren't you tempted to use both hands

and halve the difficulty – either way

the music's the same, isn't it? No.

It's not. Music can never be ‘the same.’

What do they know about exhilaration,

about the essence of gesture? So I smile

and ask in return And an arabesque …

would it be as graceful on two legs?

GREGORY WARREN WILSON

Ravel at Swim

The inability to communicate speech, writing or music when the peripheral nervous system is largely undamaged is called an aphasia.

John O’Shea, Maurice Ravel: Aspects of Musical Perception

Something dark has stolen the sea from me.

Always a seal in water, I found its

melodies and swam open harmony

through them. Now I flail. Nothing I do fits

the rhythms around me. Swiss Watchmaker

they called me for the design of my work.

Mere lover of wind-up toys, a baker

of sweets, as though elegance were a quirk.

Now the hand that holds forks by their tines floats

like driftwood on the sea of music spread

before me. It will not copy the notes

I hear like a gull's bent tones in my head.

It will not play what I see on paper

and know I wrote two years ago to be

performed one-handed. That was a caper!

I loved having such limits placed on me.

It will not sign my name. It tries to light

a match with the tip of a cigarette.

What is left? It took me eight days to write

a fifty-six word letter I have yet

to end, consoling a friend whose mother

just died. I do not want to be seen now

by anyone who knew me at another

time. Pure artifice, they said, missing how

my need for form affirmed the passions of

my heart. They must not see me with the link

from brain to limb severed and all I love

lost. Sheer formlessness surrounds me.