I'll begin with a poem.

From The Balcony

If I could entertain the eye

like the glossy browns of bass-violins

revealing under staging lights

the shadows in the valley, highlights on the knoll –

or skip along a cello, reducing a symphony

into a finger-run of the cellist’s mind

and set the fingers quivering

to kindle a string’s warm tremolo –

or wave the bow above a field of violins

at idiosyncratic angles and heights,

I might transcend the harp’s delicate futility

of hoping for a solo, and be content to listen

to the chaos of the grand tuning-up.

Dennis Fredrick Evans