The Tide - R. Scott Robison

I’ve become an old man inside my piano.

My fingers are swollen and my back is bent.

I play on and on, a black magician,

For my bench lies not in some mahogany hall,

But nestles instead between felt and felt;

Two hammers and their shanks loom near behind.

I play on and on, unwilling musician

In the darkness on some thankless keys,

An ivory tide of moonlight progressions

That never escape this dark machine.

Chromatic slides layer one by one,

An eclipsed inaudible prismatic sun.

I play on and on with fanatic precision

Coattails dancing as octaves pound upward

And all around me the silent gloom.

The notes fail to bring Fantasia, though when I was young

My etudes amazed, each frenzied opus a prelude

To the next sonorous burst of diatonic fire.

After the initial blaze, empty twilights subdued

Passion leeched into dim Faustian mire.

No Medici emerged; I descended into fugue.

When Frost’s paths divided I took the worst

And now, illumined by one weak spot

I toil mutely among the cursed.

Even Dante did not envision magic so black

As to lock away by sepulchral division

The composer of lives, the artist who first

Gave voice to the heart’s position.

A sonata’s complement’ry keys give chase

And the strophe has its fainter side

But I play on and on, grotesque physician

Attended by none save me, a solitary face

Inside my piano, unmoved by the tide.

-R. Scott Robison, 8 July 2009