A piano in the attic —
what or whom
does it attend
if unplayed, untouched?
Yet do not many of us
carry just as much silence,
long accumulating,
and just as long unsung?
Yet there is always more —
not merely the instrument,
unused and left behind,
but also the music —
And the musician,
just as gone,
or perhaps more so,
if lost
to her own self-forgetting,
to amassed and accrued non-use,
whose coat upon a life
is what ringing is to death,
hyphened into sleep —
where only ghosts
come dropping by.
And what are melodies to souls
but varied depths and portions
of lives they themselves once lived,
and thus recovered memories?
Which, in music's classic art,
possess precision and discipline,
and which, among the Romantics,
yield to cantos of the heart.
And all this somehow
goes in Czech under the name
vážná hudba —
serious music, verbatim,
or music with a weight:
a music that attends
to the source
beauty placed within,
that living gold with a mirror
so that it may search its face.
In a word:
music with a weight,
ever serious and ever sincere,
the one and only weight
that always strives skyward.
