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In Memory of Phyllis Robinson
"I have made mysterious nature my religion... to feel the supreme
and moving beauty of the spectacle to which Nature invites her ephemeral
guests, that is what I call prayer."Claude Debussy
It's an hour before the dawn of rock 'n roll:
Music has not so far been made flesh
--Or not for a working-class girl of thirteen.
And then I watch you play, star graduate
Of James Ching and the Mathay School,
Your technique so physical, so lavish,
I'd call it, now, l'écriture feminine
For pianists: but in 1958
All I know is that you are what you're playing
--You're playing La Cathédrale Engloutie.
A camera's drawn to the concert pianist's hands,
Caressing octaves, palely capering
--Sunday 'Palladium' stuff, with Russ Conway
Or Winifred Atwell (coos from the mums and dads),
To be filed under my new word: Philistine.
This is art so deep it's industry:
Music as white-water, which your spine
Channels, springing arms transform. That's how
You lift and tumble these ton-weights of bell power:
I watch you, not your hands. I watch the sea,
Out of my depth, though, like La Cathédrale.
I mean all this to last--the 8 hours practise
Each day, hopeless devotion--and it does
--In other contexts. Oh, I bury it,
Music, and you, and all the pain of childhood,
But lumber back like a mediaeval builder
With washed-up stones (some good stone, too) and prayers,
To raise another heaven-touching marvel
On the same flood-site, watch another tide
Swagger in and demolish every bit.
After the last wreck, when I'd declared
The end of building-works on any coast,
Strange bells began to ring for me, the tone
Rubbed ordinary by forty years, but true:
Ghostly but not damned. What if the ghost
Wryly sang, 'Promises, promises?'
it was a gentle challenge, after all.
The sacred stones were myth. The tide that reared
So vengefully, hauled by the same moon,
Was myth. Not so, my common ground with you.
How we talk up the 'generation gap,'
Break our necks in it, and never find
The friendly crisscross trails of coexistence
--That gift which is to pause at one epoch,
The people of one earth. Yes, the years wear us...
But may all years be worn as you wore yours
That day we met, with teacherly compassion,
Because the body knows when the brighter mind
Rejects it, sulks like an untuned piano:
You lived in yours (it knew) like the luckiest girls.
It's hard, though, for the tired cells to sightread
Their last prélude, fingers twisting palm-ward
In search of rarer ivory, their guiding
Beat a laggard stone-deaf walking-stick.
Like Schubert's songs, off in another key
Before we can say 'swan', you were elsewhere:
And elsewhere, in a room nearby, your music.
I'd wanted you to play. I let that go.
You counted off your new pursuits, confiding
"I love the sea. I love to watch la mer!"
On Portrush Strand I watch it too, engrossed
Like a child beside a piano, half aware
That this, whatever 'this' may be, won't keep,
The waves themselves won't keep. But someone plays
Debussy. Something drives the bright white horses
You're not admiring now--not from these shores,
And makes them flesh, as music was, for me,
An hour before the dawn of rock 'n roll
When you, star graduate of the Mathay school,
Lifted the great bells out of the sea.
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