I had meant to be so many things:
present, knowing, incarnate,
grateful, incubated, joyous;
instead I thought about
the fur that was slipping
too far off my shoulder
and about where I was when
he looked out to the sea of faces
as it kept trying to reach me
and I kept trying to reach it.

What they heard in one hour
I heard from sunrise to dinner:
torn apart
to skeletal fragments,
no longer musical.
They could worship his fingers
like hermit crab claws
and I could kiss each knuckle
in the dark;
but still
I held no distance in my heart
between the piano and the pews:
no space for the music to breath -
only one thousand heard-again notes
and hundreds of words
wrapped in his ambition
his despair
his tenderness.

And when the last chord sounded
I sat wounded in the thunder
wondering what to do
with all that was in me.
There was too much
to hold: not only the gold
but the ore:

from slow autumn to winter,
I was his
vase of clay.

My reward is in this:
in the resting of my head
against the tremorring legs,
my hand on the black thigh,
round belly;
and when he played to an audience
of one,
I was burst backwards like the rippling
tailfeathers of a sea-faring bird --

clearing the ground of uncertainty.