Once slack habit found these fingers in scurried attempts
over the keys—a few bars coherent, full
of solemn light as the inventor intended; but mostly a muddle
of my lapses and lies.
When I hear
the man who lives upstairs play, I know that what
he does is far inside. If it is light,
it is shattered through the mullions of his own
colossal fretwork,
and the love I bear
is not for the man, black hair flagging
his tilted head as he strides through wet leaves,
one hand clutching his robe closed, for the morning paper.
Not this love—
it has visited me from fingers
in a seesaw clutch on a cello’s neck, in a run of silver
up a clarinet, of course pressing
the violin’s strings—and also, before,
from hands on a piano, need I add, not mine; but there is
some part of self-love in what love finds there,
in hunger, from singing hands.