So assume every note

in Brahms’ Handel Variations for piano

is a word.

Who can speak so quickly?

What would they be saying?

Is it music’s glory

that we’ll never know?

And yet someone wrote it down,

clearly, in context and in place,

and last night Misha Dichter

pronounced it with his fingertips—

a lost gospel, an instruction

manual for an undreamt machine?

6 March 2019