Lost in Continuities

The Broken Piano

Have all your melodies left you,        your keyboard idle as dentures,voided now of its raggedy tunes?

Even so, time still plays you,        abandoned in this drafty barn,where at night the mouse's struggle

ekes out its panicked syncopation        beneath the owl's wheeling shadowas a shutter clatters in the manic wind.

Winter having chilled you, summer        expanding your soundboard's grain,music, like desolation, has become

for you an opus cordoned off        by shrieks and groans, broken stringswhose memory of a hammer's blow

is sweetened by a finger's touch        somewhere coaxing out a last scherzobefore dissonant, cold neglect sets in.

And yet you remain, upright, serene,        your impassive bulk anchoring the darkhushed rafters, the hayloft poised to hear

the concert of your ruin, silence,        the answering choir whose crescendois final and certain, harrowing the applause.

The Sea

                        —Eugène Boudin, 1824–1898

Next to it, the mind lets go,        grasping at particulars:a buoy riding the leaden swell,        seagulls tacking the wind,or, farther off, almost immobile        against the horizon's washof salt humidity, a schooner        plying through waves,the sleekness of its wooden hull        slowly knifing toward home.

Thus, lost in continuities,        our need of them: harborsdotted with rocks, jetties anchoring        the ships, and beaches strewnwith vacationers whose casual thoughts        while strolling on sand might beabout the news from home, trouble        in the markets, or the meaningof shifts in the afternoon's weather        infusing this coastal scene,

which you have given us, Monsieur Boudin,        Deauville—La plage, marée basse,possessing still what simply was        for you "a lively tendernessfor those eternal things which so many        unhappy beings pass,and will always pass, without seeing,"        the schooner closing faston harbor and jetty, schooner and beach,        the tidal low of the amorphous sea.