Have you ever unspooled the spring in a pen?

(In my house there was a whole jar of dead pens,
To frustrate adults when they needed a pen)
- Who's riding so hard in the night and the wind?

- Schubert asks: setting the wind in your hair,
Stealing its chill from the draft in the stair,
or the voice in the eaves. Our own memories twist
In the gyre set spinning by a spasmodic wrist
A voice churned to froth by the pianist.

John Shade hears the death of his sullen, sweet child,
And sets index cards fluttering in an overtone,
A counterpoint beat, a resonant pitch,
An anodyne for that deep spiritual itch

You may find in the mornings of indifferent nights,
Which marks that what's happened is already done,
But you haven't done with it - you don't know how.
The things we repeat are the path of a spring,
My child's hands did better at pulling apart
The meat of a thing than I ever do now.