Playing Chopin (Piano Concerto #2)

Your fingers, first of all
must be capable of everything.
You must have memorized Frédéric’s very spirit.

Then, as you play:

Visualize paloverda trees, a white-peach oleander bush,
curved slender moons of evening adolescence.

The ivory keys
will become silver strands of freshwater pearls.

Tie them to the tips of those crescent moons:
opalescent lighted liquid beads
falling for miles to rest around the slender,
marble necks of Zeus-embracing-Hera
above the heart of Greece
where a fountain, trickling into copper basins,
sheds tears of divinity.

Call forth your deepest memories of reverence and grace:
a forest glen where once you stood all laced in shadow,
considering the world, your birth and death, mathematics…

Remember the uninhibited joy of children, delighted by life itself;
the way you smiled when first you fell in love.

Then, as you play,
the ivory keys

will become extensions of your fingers
and fingers extensions of your body
and body an extension of this music…

this perfect
music.