Schubert’s Piano Sonata G Major D. 894
Reminiscence (Molto moderato e cantabile)
What I remember most of those cruel and beautiful mornings
is your silence, and the pang that began so keenly in my chest,
unfurling just enough for my young body to bear.
How you’d take my hand, father, and in that moment I was yours,
and then our way, the light, the road and sky no longer oblique,
began to brighten on even the coldest of dawns.
I did my best to keep your pace, my best to hush
the childish stirrings rising and falling like a seesaw plank,
your wordless gaze set before us and mine to the birds overhead,
diving and lilting in their daybreak songs.
Too soon I’d hear the ringing from the belltower,
the flock of blue-jacketed boys running in the square.
How I longed to join them!
How I did not want you to turn and leave.
My hand would plummet as you let go
and it was an unmoored sorrow I would quiet then,
my deference so much greater than my will.
Was it love or duty, father, that summoned you to send me there?
Or had you merely arrived at the end of what you knew?
Because there must be music, this much for certain,
in whatever progeny you dreamed, the countless lessons
a dour metronome echoing through the halls of my youth,
cadences that still haunt my sleepless nights
eased now only by the blend of absolution and regret
that comes to me on a breeze from an open window.
It was I who left you, father, to the prudent details
of your days, beneath the faint sound
of distant school bells, on those cold blue mornings.
Reverie (Andante)
What if the sky were a vessel holding us,
just as it holds the sun with its battened beams of light?
Consider how lovingly rendered
in every pastoral painting—
A fleet of clouds above a river valley
the sky reaching down to caress the hills,
washed in rose and silver.
What if the sky held the weather,
the wind slipping through its fingers?
Consider how its billowy hem can hold
all varieties of rain, can veil the burgeoning storm—
The sky erupts with sudden thunder
that rattles our bones, torrents
that slicken the way home.
What if the sky contained the seas,
the ocean and lakes a mirror?
Consider how the sentinel moon
reflects across the rippled glass—
Tonight, only a lucent sliver
but soon the fullness, the dance.
The moon swells beneath a net of stars.
What if the sky could hold us forever,
with its promise of heaven?
Invocation (Menuetto. Allegro Moderato)
Spring arrives in her shimmering robe,
Her woven crown of roses,
Exalting us from slumber.
She sweeps the meadow
With her chaff and seed,
The sunlight lengthens in her bow.
Spring beckons us
To her throne of blossoms,
Our hearts open to the April rain.
Even the fairest of streamlets
Begin to trickle and wend,
and roots deeply bedded stir.
Oh, merciful Spring!
Force the buds from the bough
Until the petals shudder loose!
Adorn our path with splendor!
And when the work is done,
Lie with us as the light is fading,
Beneath the nightingale’s faint song,
Bathe us in your seraphic twilight
Until we dream of nothing else.
Rumination (Allegretto)
It is the lupine awash in the breeze
nodding their long stems to and fro
in a gesture both diminutive and grand
that it fills the whole field with motion.
And sometimes it’s the rain drops
punctuating the pond in staccato,
not a set pattern but more a trill,
a vibration, as when the ballerinas
cross the stage (bourrée en couru),
their bobbing tulle unspooling
pirouettes like pale threads
from the weaver’s spindle,
amid the perfect axis of the body,
both linear and yielding,
refined by years of practice,
years of planets spinning night to day.
It is a dragonfly’s mercurial flight
that hovers and zags and vanishes,
as sandpipers forage at the shoreline,
waves cascading in soft repetition.
But their silly scurry is fleeting,
Under the moon’s rise and pull
they disappear before the tide.
