The Physiotherapist's Piano - by Jenny Powell

The bones of his piano
have fallen out of a tune,

their shape stacked in loose

arrangements of body parts.

He has spaced the ivory keys

across the floor with spinal

precision as if each gap was

linked by the nerve of a note.

Felt hammers lean in towers

of hollow bones, air slipping

through every crevice, the air

breathing a scale of ascent.

The physiotherapist hums

with his hands, coaxes the hinges

and pins, copper strings, backposts

and pedals, bridges and board

into an upright frame,

a skeletal dream,

a silent machine.

The physiotherapist turns

the piano to face the moon

limping across the sky, stars weeping

behind a veil of cloud, scent of loss

shiver of dark, the mouth

of night calling, urgent

and angry.

The piano begins

to remember the tune.


Copyright Jenny Powell - 2011 
Reproduced for Tuesday Poem with permission from the poet. 

"Of course a physiotherapist would reconstruct an ailing piano just as he tends to the human body. As it finds itself, the piano remembers how to play the blues. . . " (Jenny Powell in an email conversation with Claire Beynon - 24 January 2010) 

Even if I didn't know she plays the French Horn, I think I'd find it difficult not to imagine Jenny Powell as a musician as well as a poet. Her poems do more than carry sound, suggest sound, express sound. They themselves sound. Her language and landscapes thunder and tinkle; they hum and blast and roar. Structurally and rhythmically, too, they seem to me like musical compositions. 

No sooner had I read The Physiotherapist's Piano than I felt compelled to read it again. And then again. For me, this has something to do with the poet's observations of what might initially seem to be a quite ordinary moment of maintenance and repair and yet has all the hush and intimacy of a vigil. The poet seems to me to be speaking as much of the relationship between a specific physiotherapist and his damaged piano/patient, as she is evoking that between universal healer/shaman and everywoman or man; our common, uncommon journey. 

I appreciate the way Jenny invites us into the space of the poem, calling on us not only to witness the repair process but somehow also to participate in it. There is darkness here; delicacy and weeping. The process is not simple, straightforward; not all light. 

Can one speak of a poem as 'patient'? I'm not sure - if not, may I at least suggest it has a quality of patience? 

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Jenny Powell is a Dunedin poet and secondary school literacy coordinator. She has written four individual collections of poetry - Sweet Banana Wax Peppers (HeadworX, 1998), Hats (HeadworX, 2000), Four French Horns (HeadworX, 2004) and Viet Nam - a poem journey (HeadworX, 2010). Helen Rickerby - one of our Tuesday Poets - introduced Jenny's latest collection on her blog Winged Ink a couple of months ago, shortly after the launch of Viet Nam - a poem journey. 

As an artist interested in collaborative work, Jenny Powell initiated the collection Double Jointed (Inkweed, 2003) with ten poets of her choice, and in 2004 published Locating the Madonna with North Island poet Anna Jackson (Seraph Press).

Jenny features on the CD and book New New Zealand Poets. She was a finalist in the 2008 and 2009 Great Britain Aesthetica Creative Works Competition, short-listed for the 2009 UK Plough Poetry Prize and was a runner up in the 2010 UK Myslexia Poetry Competition. Her work can be found in a variety of international publications.

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This week's editor is NZ artist & writer, Claire Beynon.  

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