Well, You Needn’t

Rather than hold his hands properly

arched off the keys, like cats

with their backs up,

Monk, playing block chords,

hit the keys with his fingertips well

above his wrists,

shoulders up, wrists down, scarce

room for the pencil, ground

freshly to a point,

piano teachers love to poke

into the palms of junior

pianists with lazy hands.

What easy villains these robotic

dullards are in their floral-

print teaching dresses

(can those mauve blurs be

peonies?). The teachers’ plucky,

make-do wardrobes suggest, like the wan

bloom of dust the couch exhaled

when I scrunched down to wait

for Mrs. Oxley, just how we value

them. She’d launch my predecessor

home and drink some lemonade,

then free me from the couch.

The wisdom in Rocky Mount,

North Carolina, where Monk grew up,

is that those names, Thelonious

Sphere, came later, but nobody’s

sure: he made his escape

by turning himself into a genius

in broad daylight while nobody

watched. Just a weird little black

kid one day and next thing anybody

knew he was inexplicable

and gone. We don’t give lessons

in that. In fact it’s to stave off

such desertions that we pay

for lessons. It works for a while.

Think of all the time we spend

thinking about our kids.

It’s Mrs. Oxley, the frump

with a metronome, and Mr. Mote,

the bad teacher and secret weeper,

we might think on, and everyone

we pay to tend our young, opaque

and truculent and terrified,

not yet ready to replace us,

or escape us, if that be the work.