For Glenn Gould
I like the ambient twittering noises you hear
around offices. You, a Canadian, may
not understand. You became so old once,
didn’t you—and yet your strangeness
outlives you, lives outside of you as I
also live outside of you. I do feel, inside
(wherever that is), that I am alive and you
are not but not so much that I am moved
to sing and to dance. I remember the
brown brick of the house you would
not come out of. In Ontario,
the brick is yellow on the old farmhouses
that I’m sure you remember passing on
family trips to Lake Huron or Lake Erie.
Your parents once drove a Ski-Doo to a funeral
on Baker Lake in Nunavut along Hudson
Bay, you know, and the northern dark
lowered early that day and they were at a
crossing in the road—not so much a road
but a path of impacted snow with walls
of snow the height of a woman on either
side where they lost their way and your
mother said “should we take the path
on the right-hand side or the path on the left
because one will surely lead home and
the other . . .”—her speech trails off here.
Vivid and filmic images come to them
of a long and difficult death in the snow
where they become so cold they can’t bear it
and then the cold leaves them and they feel
they are drifting into a sleep like the kind
you drift into after a night of boozing
and they know they are done for
but have forgotten to cry out. Your mother
says a decision has to be made and she takes
the left one and they were lucky and right
and they reach the bivouac and they strip off
their polyester parkas and snow pants and the
long underwear and thermal shirts underneath
and your father removes his snow goggles
to reveal a small triangle of skin frozen white
where his forehead was exposed to the
elements between eyewear and toque.
They heat themselves up by the gas stove
where the process of warming near frozen
limbs and extremities proves painful and dizzying
and when I think about this at my desk
in my well-lit office that I am so fortunate to have
I think about you, Glenn, holed up in
the brown brick humming and hunched
curiously over the Steinway with little wooden
blocks under the legs and a rug under your feet
and I think how likely it would have been for
them to have taken the other path into nowhere
and to have died and their bodies found maybe
frozen and well preserved in the snow bank
decades from now or found after the spring
came and another, younger couple
on a Ski-Doo came across them in the brief
daylight and history would have gone the
other way as each day does and we would have
no Glenn Gould and no Goldberg and the world
of things and people would have kept on
turning without you.
Sierra Faust is a Kansas City–based artist and writer. She received her bachelor’s degree in sculpture from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2018. Sierra works in program administration at Literacy KC and is currently a resident artist at Pendleton Arts Block. Her studio is located at Agnes Arts and her work has been shown at Beco Gallery, NARS Foundation Gallery, Vulpes Bastille, and elsewhere.