For UH professor Joseph Stanton, no experience is too mundane to become the stuff of which poems are made. Here, he finds layers of meaning in an everyday experience: listening to his son practice the piano in another room. It is a poem, says the writer, that is always well-received in readings. It will be included in his forthcoming collection, "Field Guide to the Wildlife of Suburban O'ahu."

Stanton is an award-winning editor (for the anthology he co-edited, "The Quietest Singing"), author of several poetry collections, a winner of the Cades Award for Literature and a past president of the Hawaii Literary Arts Council.

PRACTICING JOY

BY JOSEPH STANTON

Practicing the "new song" on the piano,

my son stumbles in a dark undergrowth —

losing the path then climbing back on,

then losing and finding, losing and finding

again and again and again; sudden pauses

leaving the listener stuck in the oddest places,

distracted and at a loss — noting

with exasperation that Ludwig van

can be astoundingly post-modern. Hung up,

suspended from resolution for an

excruciating, endless interval,

my entire being begging to hear joy

break out from its cage of broken tones,

as it finally does for a moment here,

a moment there, till at last

there comes a burst of rapture,

partial still, but ornate enough for now,

a joy my boy does not quite know he's made.

Reprinted by permission of the author. This poem previously appeared in the fall 1988 issue of Hawai'i Pacific Review. Poems for this column are selected by books editor Wanda A. Adams. This column does not accept unsolicited poems and considers only poems previously published in an independent anthology or collection.