ManicDDaily

Bonanza (Beneath the Bench)

When I think of poems about music, I want to write about a boy lying beneath his mother’s piano.

He stares up into the dark overwhelm of board and sound, his mother’s ankles at the top of his head like another protuberance of ears.  He pictures her fingers above the keys, her knuckles as sculpted  as St. Sebastian’s musculature–the chiaroscuro of ribs, thighs, endurance.  He has seen a painting of St. Sebastian in a book, and a child of the early twentieth century, he has studied it at length.

As the music swells, aches surge through the boy’s heart, the minor tonics filling him with an inarticulate sense of love thwarted, death premature–it must be Chopin that his mother plays–

And then his mind moves to a foot soldier in an eventide of olive drab, and, one finger tapping the other wrist, he imagines himself as hero–humble, destined. Perhaps he’ll even save her.

I’ve snuck this boy from the piano poems of Lawrence and Rilke, though when I picture him in the light and shadow of mahogany furniture, trembling crystal, a coal fire, and the impending cataclysm of World War I, I feel his memories as my own.

Which is impossible, grandiose, for in truth, I am a woman of a much later time, who, as a young girl, had an upright piano (impossible to fit under), so that what I lay beneath was the piano’s tan and shiny bench, and the only reason I lay there was not because my mother played–she didn’t–but to stay up late Sundays, a school night, and to watch, hidden from my parents, the TV just around the bend in the wall.

Bonanza was the show, starring leather-vested Ben and his ranch sons, Hoss, Adam and Little (curly-haired) Joe.

And talk about music! Tumpdada-dadadum-dadadum-dadadum-dadaduuuumdaaaa–there was music that galloped, along with the big-hipped steeds, right through the screen.

By the time my parents noticed me, they’d usually relent, letting me watch to the end from a more unobstructed place where I could jump up whenever the horses dadadummed and gallop along–more or less in place–but with enough bounce to make my long hair flap against my shoulders, imagined reins.

How strange it is, I think now, that it was the horses that I imitated. Then again, I was a mid-twentieth-century girl, not imagined boy, who had just come out of her hiding place.

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I am posting the above “prose poem” for dVerse Poets Pub Open Link Night, hosted by the incomparable Hedgewitch (Joy Ann Jones.)  But this particular poem was actually inspired by Stu McPherson’s “Music” prompt for dVerse’s Poetics challenge of the other day.    (Also by two wonderful “piano” poems respectively by D.H. Lawrence and Rainer Maria Rilke.)  I urge you to check all out.   And, if you are in the mood, also check out my books,  1 Mississippi  (children’s counting book with elephants), Going on Somewhere, poetry, and Nose Dive, escapist fun.

PS – the picture is a bit of a joke, not quite my vision of any of the characters here!  Also SO SORRY THIS IS SO LONG.  I really appreciate your reading!