Stephen Paul Miller
Damage
1.
Everything inside me insists,
resists, and goes under.
Dreamy against a moment’s
skin,
like a building
upside-down,
Scott Joplin and Irving Berlin meet
and the Great American Songbook opens.
I tell you this class is going
nowhere
and you say
that’s what you like about it.
Sometimes Joplin drops in,
but the connections are loose.
Suddenly everything feels left
to right
sliding
sideways making me
forget all the chest pains
settling in.
Captive roses with their
blooms cut,
we swing on
each severed downbeat.
Chopin keeps his notes tight
and Brahms bubbles up
Through the milky Sergio Leone
film.
shaping us. Where
we are is what we do.
I’m just blazing it.
No one in this class knows how or when
Franklin Roosevelt was elected
but I feel warm spring air.
Do you want to say something
with my pen
because all I do is take attendance.
To me that means
putting more
quarters in the washing
machine,
setting
different cycles,
rinsing and drying,
softening and folding.
I don’t invent fine
distinctions in order
to
make some better than others.
When I’m wild, the class
controls me.
This is
such a good class—
so calm and controlled—
they don’t notice the teacher is sleeping.
2.
Bach volunteers
in a free clinic
playing late Joplin that’s
more like jazz,
then
segueing into a very proper 1890s
Joplin waltz much
like the two Chopin mazurkas
nine-year old Tchaikovsky plays
on a water piano.
A spotlight on Tchaikovsky
completes the effect.
