The Virtues of Calamity 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 ________________________________________________________________________ Emanuel E. García, The Virtues of Calamity, One Hundred Poems, 2013 |