Practice

1/ 

Nothing would outlast the quest for the flute fingering 

for C above middle C. A code withheld from me 

as I sought to wrest that imagined tone from 

its stature in a sphere that would not include me. 

I could not practice enough, but practiced constantly. 

It was all anybody knew of me. Spooling tunes by ear 

alongside precise etudes poured out through screens 

of the many-windowed room of light 

we oddly called the porch, from which neighbors 

heard within their homes.

2/

No one impatient should play, that deceptive word

    with too many meanings, including perform,

    and cooperate. The flute in my hands prompted 

    a wince where a caress might have been, 

    as I de facto knelt to authority I could not abide, 

    that act of seizing my brain for purposes not my own. 

    An implicit game of keep-away involving my life's work. 

    But was that really my life's work, and not the words I felt

    whispered between the tones, that sacrificial silence, 

    immodest as stones?   

3  3/

    Crestfallen is a word my mother used to relay 

    that aftermath that means evaporation of the dream  

    imbued with hope, from a propped-up perch 

    looked down from, as if an imagined silver ad hoc 

    resting place, smooth as an ironed shirt saved for best 

    throughout the meantime of suspicious stillness 

    awaiting what you insisted you desired 

    amid that loneliest wilderness.