A piano playing soft allowed an aire of sweet melody to
escape from the soul of the pianist. Lifts and lilts and warm tones so peaceful
spread carried high by cascading currents of emotions. In a room filled with
the faint scent of incense the heart shaped pattern of the music emerged.
A young man clad in blue jeans and a Martin Strings t-shirt
heard the music. Alone and simply walking by the performance space he was
seduced by the purity of sound. From a room large enough for a small concert
but currently empty of anything but the piano at one end and a few chairs close
to the door at the other end the music poured out. The sound just grabbed the
soul of this passerby.
The lid to the piano was up and the one man audience was
obscured from the view of the performer. He had entered the room as quietly as
a cat.
Summoning years of emotions bottled up inside of her heart
and head she let delicate fingers find their way to press those keys evoking a
romanticism of the real. The sole member of the audience felt a connection to a
soul exploding both with joy and longing. Each note carried laughter and loss.
As each peak and ebb of the music passed he scribbled with
the pencil that had been stuffed in his notebook’s pocket onto its lined
paper. Words flowed out.
Flowers
Rain
Eternity
A heart’s burden
Connection
Acceptance
Surrender
The pianist was lost in her own world. Pure feeling was flowing out into all that
the strings and dead trees and ivories could loose from her soul. She played with her eyes closed not thinking
thoughts constructed from the artifice of words. She played with lightness of pure feeling.
Words first fell upon the paper and then words became lines
and lines became verses and choruses, stanzas and refrains. He scrawled and erased and struggled for
synonyms and argued with himself over the couplets and the meter. But it all flowed as easily as the music
flowed from the pianists hands, mostly.
Eventually the music peaked and grew soft. It peaked again
but now not quite as loud. Then it grew soft with strong but subtle chords. The
writer placed his pencil back in the flap inside his notebook. Very quietly he stood
up and headed for the door. As he headed out he heard the coda and then it was
done.
She never knew he was there.
He worked that poem for months to resolve the mostly. Then he set it aside. After a year he returned to the work and
stared at it for hours. He wasn’t happy,
the words were not the perfection that the music had been. He thought he would take a stab at a verb
tense change or a different adjective but he eventually gave up. If he changed any single thing more in the
poem he might lose the memory of a perfect moment.
He became the writer he had planned to be when he had
started carrying around those little ringed binders. He worked in prose and published op-ed
pieces. He sold his work and he dreamed
that eventually he would get a story in the New Yorker but that was a goal, not
an end. As the years went by he would come back to that poem again and again
and each time he was in that room anew. He never shared the poem. The poem was
his and he rebuilt the room and the sound each time he ran his eyes across those
lines.
As the years went by she never abandoned the piano. She made money from her gift. She played well and found her way onto a few
CDs as a backing player. She played in
support of musical theatre productions and grand affaires. She loved her music
and it showed. But she would often return
to thoughts of that day when in a sunlight filled empty hall she had sat down
at a piano and let everything that was in her flow out. She knew to herself that was the best she had
even given and the best the piano had ever yielded for her. She savored that she had a moment which
belonged to her like that. .Her only
regret was that no one had been there to share in her accomplishment.
