This is a poem about a mother and a daughter.
And it's called "Solfeggietto."
And I don't know whether piano students,
at this time in history, ever study a little practice
exercise piece called "Solfeggietto."
But it was a study for piano students when I was a girl.
Solfeggietto.
Your windfall at 15, your Steinway
grand paid for by fire insurance,
came to me as birthright--
a black cave with teeth of ebony and ivory,
twanging and thundering over the head of the crawling child.
Until that child was set on the big book on the chair
to face the keyboard world of black and white--
already knowing the world was black and white.
The child's hands, smaller than a sand dollar, set on the keys,
wired to their mysteries.
The child's wits facing the ruled and ruling staves.
For years, we battled over music lessons--
mine taught by you.
Nor did I wonder what that keyboard meant to you.
The hours of solitude, the practicing,
your life of prized recitals, lifted
hopes, Piatti's nephew praising you at 16,
scholarships to the North.
Or what it was to teach boarding-school girls, what
won't be used, shelving ambition, beating
time to "On the Ice at Sweet Briar" or "The Sunken
Cathedral" for a child counting the minutes and the scales
to freedom.
Freedom.
What could that mean for you or me?
Summers of '36, '37.
Europe untuned.
What I remember isn't lessons--
not Bach or Brahms or Mozart--
but the rented upright in the summer rental,
One Hundred Best-Loved Songs on the piano rack.
And so you played evenings.
And so we sang "Steal Away" and "Suwanee River,"
"Swing Low," and, most of all, "Mine Eyes Have
Seen the Glory of the Coming of the Lord."
How we sang out the chorus.
How I loved "the watch-fires of the 100 circling camps"
and "truth is marching on" and "let us die to make men free."
Piano lessons.
The mother and the daughter.
Their doomed exhaustion, their common mystery worked out
in finger exercises--
Czerny, Hanon, the yellow Schirmer albums, quarter rests,
double holds, glyphs of an astronomy.
The mother cannot teach the daughter,
because this is not the story of a mother teaching magic to her
daughter.
Side by side I see us locked--
my wrists, your voice are tightened.
Passion lives in old songs in the kitchen,
where another woman cooks, teaches, and sings
"He shall feed his flock like a shepherd."
And in the book-lined room, where the Jewish father reads
and smokes and teaches Ecclesiastes, proverbs,
the Song of Songs, the daughter struggles with the strange
notations--
dark chart of music's ocean, flowers, and flags--
but would rather learn by ear and heart.
The mother says she must learn to read
by sight, not ear and heart.
Daughter who fought her mother's lessons--
even today a scrip of music balks me--
I feel illiterate in this, your mother tongue.
Had it been Greek or Slovak, no more could your native alphabet
have baffled your daughter, whom you taught for years
held by a tether over the ivory and ebony teeth
of the Steinway.
It is the 300th anniversary of Johann Sebastian Bach.
My earliest life woke to his English Suites
under your fingers.
I understand the language I can't read.
Music you played streams on the car radio in the freeway night.
You kept your passions deep.
You have them still.
I ask you, both of us--
Did you think mine was a virtuoso's hand?
Did I see power in yours?
What was worth fighting for?
What did you want?
What did I want from you?