Nowadays they dish the music up

            Like spinach to a kid

            And sandwich it between

            Events I always tended to avoid:

            Pre-concert lectures and post-concert

            Meet-and-greets

 

            Empty cafés and a sodden Sunday afternoon

            Had forced my hand, so I had time to kill

            And found myself among an audience of few

            Before the show

 

            The pianist was an elderly man,

            Pudgy and a bit unkempt,

            A Russian I had never heard of

            Visiting the provinces on tour,

            About to play a programme not

            So likely to be swallowed easily –

            Beethoven: opus 111,

            Scriabin: Sonata number 10

 

            He was speaking philosophically

            About the instrument

            But I somehow couldn’t seem to catch his drift:

            To me the piano might be overloud, cacophonous,

            Discordant or perhaps inconsequential

            In effect, but not a source of pain

            Besides, it all depended on the

            Player’s touch

 

            And it was then I spied the missing half a finger

            On the hand he waved to make his point,

            His right

 

            My father’s stub resembled his:

            A half-inch shorter than the pinky

            It was next to,

            Visible especially when he shaved

 

            And though my father wasn’t shy

            The most he said about it was

            That every loss always entailed a gain

 

            I didn’t think he meant the stutter

            That began after the injury

            And never went away,

            Nor did I ask

 

            It made for problems, naturally . . .

 

            Woken from such thoughts

            By faint applause, I settled back

            And speculated on the plethora of notes

            The pianist would invariably omit

 

            I was mistaken, for the Russian

            Tossed the compositions off

            The way a matador might wield a cape

 

            Whatever he had done to compensate

            Had done the trick:

            I couldn’t hear that he had missed a beat

 

            And for the encore, a Scriabin poem,

            He used his stump to sound the final note

            When any other digit would have done

 

            A more than competent performance

            All in all, against the odds

 

            When afterwards I appeared,

            The second – and the last – in line,

            To get his signature,

            I couldn’t help but blubber on

            About the disability

 

            He gazed at me a moment –

            Then, offering his hand to shake,

            Closed tight enough on mine

            So that I winced a bit

            While telling me in whispers

            That to make a virtue of necessity

            Required nothing special:

            Calamity alone

            Brought out the best because it

            Meant a person had to choose

 

            I nearly fainted from his boozy breath

            But once he eased his grip

            I saw my father in a slightly different light