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What Music Will It Make?
Playing the Black Piano
by Bill Holm
Milkweed Editions, 2004, 132 pages
The character of Bill Holm’s new collection of poems, Playing the Black Piano, can be discerned from reading the book’s dedication page; it is offered in memory of two men
who practiced princely generosity to guests, to literature, to the liveliness and wisdom of the human spirit, who kept their fine old houses open to a little good whiskey and good talk late in the night, who left too soon. Salud, my friends!
Holm lives up to the spirit of these old friends in poems that speak eloquently of places, music, pain, death. He begins with a poem about his ancestral home, Iceland, titled “The Ghost of Wang Wei Looks at Skagafjord”: “How the old Chinese poets would have admired Iceland,” Holm proclaims, “Everything appears one at a time, at great distance,” and then strokes a verbal Zen painting of a poem, including the image of
One farmer
the size of a matchstick walks out of his thimble barn
to his postage-stamp hay field while
over his head a river falls half a mile
off a cliff . . .
In “Night Fishing in Skagafjord” Holm conjures a thirteen-year-old girl fishing till midnight “What does she cast for every night / In this white light that lasts ’til August? / Pink trout? Love? The future? / Or does she fish to practice patience?” In an Icelandic supermarket he approaches the cashier with credit cards ready, only to find that it is a cash-only establishment, and perceives himself in “a foreign country even I have never traveled -- the kingdom of the poor” while impatient housewives mutter in line behind him.
But wait! Here’s 5,000 note -- cash, the hoarded cash of the poor, a
crown or two kept in a cup until there’s enough for bread, milk, salt
horse, a pancake.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
In the kingdom of the poor, every language is foreign, every country is
strange, somewhere you’ve never traveled before, that will not want to
see the likes of you again.
Playing the Black Piano is imbued with a sense of loss -- not just of the two men named in the dedication, but, in “An Early Morning Café,” of those lost in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001: “Humans so riddled with hate they turned / from men to bombs smashed the girders / under your café, though they’d never met you, / to murder you for the glory of God.” Holm’s warning in the wake of 9/11 is clear, and applies not just to the perpetrators of that horrific act but to any person or community with an overgrown sense of certainty:
If you think you’ve bagged the one truth
and that truth wants final sacrifice,
then you’ve stepped outside the human race,
and your plane will not land in heaven
wherever you think it might be.
Holm also mourns a public man, Senator Paul Wellstone:
This time, as so often
before, Death snatched a big one
when we could not stand to lose
his voice that spoke, not alone,
but for us millions who longed
for a world green, alive, about to bloom.
In his section of poems about Dr. Mike Doman, Holm’s observations are elegant, direct, and acute.
One night I arrive at the door,
find a note: “I am sick.
Come in quietly. I don’t need
to be told. The handwriting
gave me the news. While he aged
a month, it aged a century.
The dying man has one last vital wish: “. . . he wants to live -- / to rise from the couch, shower, / take everyone to dinner.” But neither he nor his friends can avoid the inevitable.
Still he wants to live,
and about this one last wish,
nothing can be done.
There is poetic justice, however, in the way that one life ending flows and merges to make it’s indelible mark on another.
I take my own hands to the black piano thinking this may be the last
music this lovely man hears in this world. Go out with the best . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
He opens his eyes. “Beautiful,” he says . . . .
After he goes, a day or two later, I found out he’s willed me the black
piano. I’m left to wonder: what music will it make now?
Bill Holm is himself an ebullient, generous, hospitable man, and this collection of poems is chock full of perfectly pitched emotion and finely drawn observation. By inviting us into his losses he provides good medicine for heart, mind, and soul. Playing the Black Piano resonates long after the hands leave the keys.
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