Sydney Lea: A Busy Life

I was dusting our piano this morning, a Steinway parlor grand we bought from a lovely, talented friend whose arthritis, at far too young an age, made it impossible for her to play anymore. The idea was that our children would take lessons and bless this house with music, and indeed, all did take piano lessons. Only one of the five, however, got well beyond “Long, Long Ago” and other such ditties that have been used for teaching purposes since– well, long, long ago. But that daughter, like her brothers and sisters, is grown and gone.

Not that our musical cravings haven’t been seen to now and then by other siblings: that girl’s oldest brother is not only an accomplished guitarist but also a luthier, making custom instruments that are genuine works of art, both in sound and looks, and her younger sister does more than just sing well: innate talent and voice instruction have made her a true vocalist.

But I wasn’t taking any of this into account as I dusted. My wife can’t play the piano, and the best I can do is haltingly render melodies with my right hand. I could simply never read two clefs at once, so I switched from keyboard to reeds in my teens, and even then I’d never have been described as virtuosic with clarinet or sax. Our noble Steinway therefore stands mute most of the time.

So in a moment of despondence this morning, I regarded my dusting as utterly pointless. I even conjured the famous and often misquoted language from Genesis:

By the sweat of your brow
            you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
            since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
            and to dust you will return.

I made a few more swipes with the cloth, then went on, rather listlessly, to hum “Dust in the Wind,” a hit by pop band Kansas almost fifty years ago, its title meant to describe us mortals here on earth. I was clearly constructing a dreary inner lament, a mode I’ve doubtless too often indulged, even if most of my personal experience has been full of good fortune compared to many others’. I was ready to use the dust I flushed from those gleaming surfaces as an emblem of mortality. In a providential flash of clarity, however, I rebuked myself, aware that it’s like falling off the proverbial log for me to sink into all that. Melancholy has tempted me frequently enough as to become downright hackneyed.

I’m an old man now, and I do acknowledge a certain kind of pointlessness, namely my occasionally fervent striving to decode my life’s “meaning,” and even the world’s. In saner moments, I can actually consider the futility of such an endeavor a relief and a blessing. It may sound counter-intuitive but standing on the near edge of an unbridgeable gap, lacking the tools to describe with any precision either what I am or it is, and recognizing that lack, can lead me to a kind of celebration that would have been unavailable in my youth and young manhood. 

I see such ignorance and striving as benefits, because I wouldn’t have gotten however far I may have gotten if I hadn’t vigorously persisted for some time in the deluded belief that in due course I’d find the key to everything, and that, having found it, I’d communicate the discovery to all who’d hear me in precise and exquisite language. 

Such delusion made for a busy life, and it really still does. If I ever had “gotten it,” if I ever had been able to say what “it” was, if I ever had been able to translate the mysteries of the universe – well, wouldn’t everything have come to stagnation? I keep at my writing because, as Auden famously said, “a poem is never finished, only abandoned.” I’d extend that surmise to my prose work as well– or anyone’s.

The image and the example of a late colleague come to mind in this respect. A rather renowned poet in his middle years, he was persuaded in his late ones that, at least as a wordsmith, he had drunk some magic elixir, which turned every poem he wrote –sometimes as many as a dozen in a day– into a lyrical triumph.

The man consistently failed to lodge his poems with the more respected literary magazines, a disappointment he attributed to one of two factors, or often both at once: 1. Contemporary editors were too young to know the world, especially the world of literature, as profoundly as he did. 2. The formerly estimable journals had been taken over by homosexuals, who couldn’t appreciate the macho vigor underlying his work.

I sometimes worry that I may resemble that old-timer, not, perish the thought, in his homophobia or his contempt for the young but in churning out poem after poem, essay after essay, even– or perhaps especially– as an octogenarian. I’m more or less the same age as he was when he decided that the realm of letters was locked in ignorance of the true, the good, and the beautiful. Whenever someone expresses astonishment at my being so prolific in this time of life, then, I wince a bit, worried that prolix, as for him, would be more accurate.

Be all that as it may, I go back to my dusting. Tomorrow, the youngest of our eight grandchildren, seventeen-month-old May, will arrive with that piano-playing daughter, her mother, and her father. Both parents are comfortable at the keyboard, so there will be singalongs to Christmas tunes and carols, our son-in-law playing chord progressions dictated by a computer something-or-other that I don’t understand and never will. May’s mom will perhaps from time to time sit on the bench I’ve just polished to play whatever comes to heart or mind. And May herself, who clearly believes she too can play our Steinway, will sit there when she chooses, banging away at the keys and chanting a song whose wordless babble I can almost translate.

Copyright 2026 Sydney Lea

Sydney Lea was Poet Laureate of Vermont (2011-2015). A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller and Fulbright Foundations, Lea founded, and for thirteen years edited, NEW ENGLAND REVIEW. Retired after 43 years of college teaching, he is active in literacy and conservation efforts in northern New England. Lea has published thirteen volumes of poetry.