Gold’s grace comes not from a mine,
but his mind. I’m a composer’s son.
Music’s 22-carat beauty and forza
seed my cortex before first breath.
Its gleam sings itself into the boy to be.
Music teaches me about order. I thrive
on its inevitability. Keys dance me up
and down a golden staircase. Notes,
luminous, lead everywhere and back.
Sunrise’s fingers on the run.
The predictability echoes my view,
innocent, of the world. I need, simply,
to uncover its melody. Unravel
its rhythmic sheen. Practice perfecting
the art of practice, my aureate rule.
Is the world a musical suite, destined,
like a song’s brilliance, to beguile?
Or is it gold’s darker side, a minor key?
How notes plated in sadness, I discover,
seek to draw me in.
I live in two worlds. The outer, radiant
with youth. The inner, raw, unpolished.
My keyboard prowess blooms. I watch
in dismay, as harmony’s gilded age fades,
under querulous arpeggios of the now.
Dick Altman writes in the high, thin, magical air of Santa Fe, NM, where, at 7,000 feet, reality and imagination often blur. Pushcart Prize nominee and poetry winner of Santa Fe New Mexican’s annual literary competition, he has authored some 275 poems, published on four continents.
Note: The author’s father, Arthur Altman, wrote more than 400 songs for stage, screen, radio and TV.
