- 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. [End Page 208]
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. [End Page 209]
Peter Filkins is the author of two books of poems, What She Knew and After Homer.