IV

Quiet Sundays when couples sit and turn over in their hands the small touches of the house, to the beating heart of an intravenous operation, stemming from an operation on both my hands, still cramped and confined by its traumatized ligaments from falling while (unsuccessfully) racing my granddaughter Tia: fingers not broken, but chastened.

Fragments emerge from the bloody fingers of Brinkerhoff in the final fight with his alter ego, pursued on Baruntse near Everest by the Satanic Rin, destroying the climbing team one by one with runes and hieroglyphs, fighting over control of an ancient trading company, blood under the bridge which we’ve signified with Cathy’s fingerprints on the books published by the Brinkerhoff Foundation.

In a pianist’s fingers lower the runes and ruins of galaxies, of ancient worlds and out-of-print libraries, bounced off the ivories of the piano, flayed fingers sliding down the keys like sleighs, like Brinkerhoff’s bloodied fingers grasping at the snowy edge of a cliff.

We wear our hearts on our fingers, pianists.

Hidden in the poem is the line, “sleighs lost in snow,” which, years ago, Archibald MacLeish had singled out in a poem of mine, saying it would haunt him for weeks. So I broke it up and wrote variations on it here.

The moment en passant tosses and turns over the bric-a-brac of a pianist’s house in the possibly final moments of his life. It is falling snow as meditation, on a mild Sunday afternoon in the Himalayas.