I’m like those players of the Musikfreunde,
only instead of tails I wear an apron.
Or, no, I’m like the man who wrote from left
to right the notes that I drive into pewter
from right to left all the long day like some
great woodpecker, pounding a flat-faced maul
onto this punch or that that I’ve grabbed up,
not looking, from wood cases that stand bristling
with metal music like the backs of hedgehogs,
repeating in reverse his propped-up pages,
playing them on my kind of Hammerklavier.
Why working backwards hasn’t turned me cross-eyed,
you tell me, but I’ve done it forty years,
starting when I was nine, before my father
flopped at the music-printing business, selling
shop, stock, ink, metal, and good name for almost
nothing, but with one firm entailment: keep
this young man in your employ all his life.
He could have got more by not putting that
into the contract. Then I might have kept
learning Klavier. If that proved not to make
my fortune as the maestro said it would,
this or some other printer would have jumped
to hire a man who could read notes and staffs
better than words, whose fingers flicked among
the punches for whole note, half note, bass clef,
sharp, flat, rests, treble clef, eighth note, as if
playing glissandos, chords, and trills, his eyes
fixed on the score, bravura strokes stamp-stamping
each sign as clear as if it were his mind
making this work up, not his hands obeying
the manuscript a man his same age wrote.
I rarely hammer home an eighth for a quarter
or sharp a G that should have been a flat,
and yet a proof came back one day with this
scrawled in the margin: You damned fool! I’d like
to see him play the steel keyboard I play,
to punch in ten days what I punch in one,
he who of all composers ought to know
the temper of my life, spending my days
amid a million notes I never hear.