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William Matthews - Well, You Needn’t
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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.
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