The Piano - by Heidi Curtis

The Piano

" You need to practice," mother would tell me
so I'd keep plucking until I was free.

My teacher would tell me to curve my hands
and I was to sit up strait at her grand.

I'd listen to the metronome tick tock
When my lesson was finished I would walk

Home where my mother would ask me again
to play a song for her inside the den

I would fumble and pause an awful lot
but she never gave it a second thought

I would spend four years learning the language
of piano: I could hardly manage

Once I gave up I thought that I was free
from sitting down to play another key

Never again would I have to practice
I'd do as I please: become an actress

Now it's been years since I've sat and played
but seeing it I hear a serenade

I will sit down to pluck out a few lines
not able to remember I resign.

Sadly, I think of what I could have been
If I listened to my mother back when

She had told me that her biggest regret
was giving up on piano, "you bet!"

It's funny how I yearn to play it now
I strain to remember with furrowed brow

I've found the wisdom in my mother's words
too late to go back and move with the herds

So here I sit and write at 21
with no talent to show, not even one!

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The poem above is an imitation of Pencil by Marianne Boruch

Pencil

Pencil

By Marianne Boruch b. 1950 Marianne Boruch

My drawing teacher said: Look, think, make a mark.

Look, I told myself.

And waited to be marked.

Clouds are white but they darken

with rain. Even a child blurs them back

to little woolies on a hillside, little

bundles without legs. Look, my teacher

would surely tell me, they’re nothing

like that. Like that: the lie. Like that: the poem.

She said: Respond to the heaviest part

of the figure first. Density is

form. That I keep hearing destiny

is not a mark of character. Like pilgrimage

once morphed to mirage in a noisy room, someone

so earnest at my ear. Then marriage slid.

Mir-aage, Mir-aage, I heard the famous poet let loose

awry into her microphone, triumphant.

The figure to be drawn —

not even half my age. She’s completely

emptied her face for this job of standing still an hour.

Look. Okay. But the little

dream in there, inside the think

that comes next. A pencil in my hand, its secret life

is charcoal, the wood already burnt,

a sacrifice.