Wine of the Heart - Ruth Padel

[Larry Robinson]

Wine of the Heart

When I was small I was sometimes allowed
to stay up when my father played quartets.
He gave his friends a glass of sherry first.

I remember him wiping little glasses,
opening music stands, opening the door
to the Iraqi violinist he played with before we were born

who was weak now, had to prop his elbow
to hold a violin. My dad put cushions under his arm,
offered a little wine. He couldn’t drink, he said.

Wine of the heart, he said, gazing up with his dark
burnt eyes. The names of where these players came from,
Ljubljana Hungary Germany Iraq,

were as much a part of the grown-up world
as the peppermints my father kept
in the glove pocket of our first car,

a fawn Ford Popular, to help him give up cigarettes.
I learned that music comes from everywhere.
That it takes strength to hold a violin,

that music crosses languages
and is mysteriously connected
to what we feel

and never say, because my father worked
in hospitals of the mind
and was often away.

I remember sitting on the floor
watching his face as he played his cello.
I learned that music is love,

an echolocation
which falters or explores
across a cave of unknown distances

most safely entered by music
and summed up in the black-and-white photo
of my dad with his sister, brother, parents

sitting by their music stands. Granny
with her viola, which I inherited,
Grandfather with his violin. My dad is eight

pointing to the music with his bow
and a white bust of Beethoven
glowers on a pedestal above.

I picture my dad’s quartet at work
on Razumovsky I.
He has the opening tune. I know he’s anxious

to play it well. Maybe I’m still
anxious for him, even now after he’s died,
as I stand in the evening light of old Vienna

looking up at the room where Beethoven tried
to knock a hole through the wall
and make a new window, so he could see the hills.

	- Ruth Padel