"Heart and Soul"

Fourteen and twelve, we were the despair

of Mrs. Margrove and our mother-

who could play Rachmaninov by sight

and almost anything by ear, who

each Saturday, would send us on flagging

feet down Euclid Avenue, a dollar

folded in our pockets, to the purgatory

of Schirmer's First Piano Book,

a metronome encased in rosewood

ticking off our girlhood hours,

where, in turn, we laid waste

to "The Happy Farmer," stumbled

over "Fur Elise" until, at last released,

we headed home to the one true

song, again and again, fortissimo-

my left hand, her right-the tremolo

of our voices filled with the world's

old hunger, dying, as we were,

to give our hearts and bodies,

our inchoate souls. Who could have

told us then how the heart's merely

a muscle, unreliable at best, or

how much I would miss the press

of her knee against my own, her heart

and soul... her good right hand.