Your life is a quiet piano,

So many brilliant keys that never got played.

It was like that for your father too,

Rats eating away at the strings

Of a derelict cello

In the privacy of a basement flat.

Someone in the family’s got to be musical,

To try out a quaver or a semi-tone,

To risk going out on a stave.

Otherwise it will be like a disappointing fugue,

Too many voices coming together

And reminiscing about what could have been,

Repeating a pattern of the half-begun

Only to abandon it later.

Surely there’s some instrument no-one has tried yet,

Perhaps on oboe or a clarinet,

The bright reedy sound of breath,

Still wrapped in a velvet case,

Waiting for its first solo.

It was not ours,

the white jade bear,

his taciturn back

his thoughtful paws

diligently going somewhere.

But it felt like we knew him

and should have taken him home.

What he had his eye on

was a kind of loyalty

which meant that it didn’t matter

if he never found it.

Unlike the emperor

whose love was so military,

he built a model army to die with

to protect him in his sleep from eternity.

Let’s not fight anymore.

Let’s leave these tomb-treasures

for someone else to find,

unfinished, undisturbed, unkept.

Two thousand years from now,

breath against glass,

some other couple

will feel the museum talking to them.

I will send you photo