Sort of, half blessing and half curse.
The poem.
This is a poem called "Unrelenting Flood."
It mentions a jazz musician, a famous pianist
named Art Tatum, who was one of the great giants
of his instrument and of the history of the music.
And he was, like a startlingly large number
of great early keyboard musicians,
nearly blind in the later part of his life.
This is-- and in fact the poem refers to this better than I
can summarize it so I won't.
In fact, there are interesting ways in which
that helps to form a style.
And Tatum is famous for, among other things,
his kind of inundation of notes and melody.
Sort of, filling of all the available spaces
into which silence and rests might go with music.
Without making it feel as if things were bursting.
The poem is called "Unrelenting Flood," and goes like this.
"Black key.
White key.
No?
That's wrong.
It's all tactile.
It's not the information of each struck key we love,
but how the mind and leavened heart travel by information.
Think how blind and near blind pianists range along
their keyboards by clambering over notes a sighted man would
notice to leave out.
By stringing it all on one longing.
The way befingered, blind, mountainous Art Tatum did.
The way we like joy to arrive.
In such unrelenting flood, the only way we can describe it
is by music or another beautiful abstraction.
Like the ray of sunlight in a child's drawing,
running straight to a pig's ear, tethering us all to our star."