Music, Poetry

Music. Soul food
for one who cannot eat.
Not Beethoven's late quartets.
No. But much of Mozart,
and Boccherini, Pachelbel…
Towards the year's end
we hear Enfance du Christ—
human polyphonies,
spirals of grace, humility.
You speak as with surprise
of spending Christmas
with your family.
It's my brother who's musical,
tunes our energy
like an instrument,
chooses the moment.
Then my poems. I read the ones
whose titles you announce,
as if etched into your brain,
which satisfy you
in some deep place,
while I register how tentative,
how cluttered, words are.
My brother spins out thoughts
on his guitar, notes drift
through unlit rooms and garden.
In both our inherited gifts
you take pleasure—
talents you could not live out —
a trunkful of stories burnt
in youth; hands that withdrew
from their own authority of touch
in playing Schumann, Schubert —
your best, you believed,
would not serve.
Hard physical labour
saw to the rest —
fifty years of exhaustion.
There is the life we live
and the life we do not live.
In you those streams are
reconciled, becoming one.