Our night with Ludwig
(‘A persuasive instance of the deaf leading the half-blind’:
Brian Morton, in the TLS, on the echo of an Art Tatum number
in Beethoven’s piano sonata, Op 111.)
That November night,
52nd Street was a fog of black notes
in search of a tune.
My arm in yours,
we shuffled from bar to bar
four-four time
until you clocked him paying for a beer.
The frock-coat and the fancy shirt
spelled a Massachusetts banker on the town
a hundred years ago,
but you knew him by the hair
and then by the way that brow
almost met the table, as if
he were playing the piano.
He began to talk –
pure Ohio American –
a line of chasers at his elbow.
His right hand as he spoke
plucked the arietta
from the smoke
and beat-for-beat he shoogged my take
on ‘Muskrat Ramble’,
cool and baroque,
and then sipped bourbon.
We had to lean
to catch his drift.
Listen, he said:
this is the bassline.
And he rolled the imaginary keys,
his left hand in its stride matching mine.
You and I
tacked homeward through the park,
rehearsing all the way
the jive we’d jammed the night through
on 52nd Street.
Supine in his room, shoes off,
maybe he dreamed the coda
of his hip sonata,
or else of mother and the boys
back in Toledo.