FROM A CONSERVATORY.

          Composer, given to dark fits –
process of elimination
          even so 5-down was yielding
so slow there was no crop of letters yet:
          fallow occurred but accrued
no takers in the horizontal field.
          I'll try and relax
                                first try
then relax.
               A forked twig, a sympathetic
nerve or two and there you have it,
          another foundling poet dowsing for spirit
in the centuries' detritus: the piano
          is asked to respond, does so softly
in sharp-scaled angles – the unhit keys
          a cocoon of deep silence, a glaucous
spathe light seeps through to a frosted keyboard –
          skeleton of a late German Romantic
moving in on the tone that played the surface
          of his temporal lobe like a manic drummer
and effaced him cell by note by   agitato   rest.