Famous Poet

A Musician’s Wife – Weldon Kees

Between the visits to the shock ward, the doctors used to let you play on the old upright Baldwin Donated by a former patient Who is said to be quite stable now.

And all day long, you played Chopin, badly and hauntingly, when you weren’t screaming on the porch that looked like an enormous birdcage.

Or sat in your room and stared out at the sky.

You never looked at me at all.

I used to walk down to where the bus stopped over the hill where the eucalyptus trees moved in the fog and stared down at the lights coming on in the white rooms.

And always, when I came back to my sister’s I used to get out the records you made

The year before all your terrible trouble,

The records the critics praised and nobody bought

That are almost worn out now.

Now, sometimes I wake in the night and hear the sound of dead leaves against the shutters.

And then a distant Music starts, a music out of an abyss,

And it is dawn before I sleep again.