The muscles of my body pull harder and crunch
with each thrust I give an afternoon's hour
at the piano when all I can really do is squirm
and try to find resolution for a day's discomfort.
It's like that sonata Mozart wrote as he must
have tried to escape the death of his son
and decided that only by slipping to a major key
would he be able to finish what it was all about.
For a time he had pushed into minor variations
while he waited a death that seemed to linger
even as he wondered what it was all about
before the final resolution could close it all.
When I was about the age of that son, I played
a number of those sonatas, not knowing yet
just what a minor key might be or what a major,
probably thinking a major was headed to war.
It was a time when so many fathers of my friends
were gone with leafs or bars on their shoulders;
and I would hide myself at the piano, glad that
Mozart was never in a war like the one I knew.
And I tried to play in such a way that it might
give comfort to old ladies whose sons
were already dead, sprawled in sandy deserts
of north Africa, unaware of a boy's efforts.
I did not know his son was dead; I did not know
just what it meant to have a son who was dead,
even though I was now 10 and had lived
a decade wondering if I'd live another year.
(From After 80 Years)