He stands hunched
shoulders pulled groundwards
by cumbersome lumbersome
weights
and though he pains
he's never lukewarm

For as his white fingers
spider the air
he's the maestro
in his unheated room
with waves of his steel baton
and blood in his old cheeks
he yields to the lost Master within

With shelves bent with dust
his audience are volumes
of books about scores for films
and squeezed between Cats and West Side Story are yellowed folders on Madam Butterfly
they stand face to back
with loving spines frayed
unable to boo or applaud

And before the curtain falls
and before he must fall into a workman's kind of sleep
he stands out-of-order under a low energy bulb
and surges before his books
and with half gone nails
and a millstone round his neck
he cuts a final great tune with his knife