Piano Lessons Poem by Roger elkin

Because she aspired to higher things
than other’s uprights, my mother, while Dad’s wealth
held, clung to a Bechstein babygrand –
a black-lacquered toad with sinister grin that squatted
in the lounge – at which, treading two brass tongues
she poured out music by the yard, and, because she thought
I ought to know how to play the piano, I was put to weekly
humiliation at some stranger’s hands in a mausoleum-parlour,
all leatherette, cabbage smells and damp.

His was an upright like upended coffin with two
candle-brackets, or altarpiece to the priest of music,
with inlaid marquetry and obelisk of metronome
monumental as the room. There, ladders of scales took me
Step By Step To The Classics but the sound remained
grounded. It was like putting Mecanno together, piece
by piece, so much undoing, tightening up, fitting a curve in;
or going to confession, repeating all last week’s sins
by not practising what was preached. What I wanted was
tunes to wing (What did I care who Sylvia was?) , not those
trills of notes like stranded tadpoles lying dried-up in nets,
so wangled out of lessons, and rejoiced when the Bechstein
gave up pride of place to a gramophone.

Looking back, I now know the value of those hours.
After years of going solo, achieving full pianissimo
in bars with trebles and Bass, I’m approaching forte,
so turn down the gramophone, and pick up duos
for four hands. I see there’s sense in five-finger exercises,
spanning hands to execute bridge passages, and, despite
humiliation at some stranger’s hands in Opus 1, I’m grounded
well in treading tongues in parlour and lounge, practised in
overtures, preludes, nocturnes, can accompany climaxes
without losing the rhythm, have found who Sylvia is,
and Rose (among the heather) , not to mention several
easy pieces, some crochety or all of a quaver in semibriefs.
And though I’ve been known to run short of notes, I know
the score. I put it together, I confess, piece after piece -
undoing, tightening up, fitting a curve in - till, vamping
my way through life, I’m a regular upright man
fast becoming babygrand.