Taking Up a Musical Instrument
People less musical than bloodhounds
have, in later life, found a talent
for playing a musical instrument.
Inexplicable, but it happens,
which gives me hope that maybe
I’ll wake tomorrow or next week,
and play the guitar like Jerry Garcia,
or the bagpipes like a pipe major,
a loch shimmering below me
with the scales and fins of a million
flashing salmon, my drones
calling them to their spawning grounds.
But I’m enthusiastically tone deaf
when I sing with musician friends,
who kid, “Do you know ‘So Low’”
or ‘Far, Far Away’?”
A friend once suggested
I take up the hammered dulcimer,
no need for finger dexterity,
her small, padded hammers flying
faster than pickpockets,
the notes she coaxed:
a miniature, archaically lovely piano
Bach might have studied
for a few moments,
then played like a virtuoso;
something I look at and see
only a magic I’ll never master.