Robert Charles Basner

View Of The Csobánka Countryside, April 20, 1942
-after a watercolor by George Byfield, in the collection of
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

How these hills could unfold a
lifetime in an accurate palette of

a first month of spring viewed
from contagion’s contempt for

such caring? It is what any
April is greened with in our going;

what daffodils sun’s last matters. It
is what is sensed as saved for lilac;

and what attempts the unagony of
hands left lain in unused purple,

white of poorest paper; it is make-
shift of morning as is any art.


“A Viola, Barcelona, 1779”
(inscribed “Filius Fecit”)”
-from an auction catalogue

Great maker’s son made it,
lateness already lyric

in its rare lathe and
graven ground,

when death decided my
own child, her rarer ear

bowing bow’s grief to the
worn warm of it,

would waver her eternal
brief from its bound;

and bid distanter music:
the lost, or beautiful,

become of
other’s mourn.


The Piano Tuner

Shabby smile shtetl
shares, hands his own old,

still meant maestro
shrugs to tune my shambled

piano. Tones he has
long since trued to

perpetuity he tries
again, but each touch

is alone in harsh harmonics—
an aged ear cast into an

aged cortex. Now, in the frayed
fingers the air he passages

is a music remembered
as rare ravish, but hears no

key to context God, or chord,
or cadence. Pity? but

isn’t this masters’ compose:
who dissonance dear—

gaunt, or gracefully, got—
to have heart’s heave

exact?— to have rehearsed
its unaccompany?


About the Author

Robert Charles Basner, M.D., Emeritus Professor of Medicine of Columbia University, is heir to the farms, fields, foliages, and fervents of place slipping shyly off the Catskill Mountains. An Alpha-Omega-Alpha graduate of the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, he also holds a Bachelor of Music degree from the City College of New York, where he studied composition and conducting. He continues teaching in the Department of Medicine at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center as a Special Lecturer in Medicine. His first collection of poems, For Medicine, Memoriam, was published in April 2025 by Spuyten-Duyvil Press: spuytenduyvil.net/For-Medicine-Memoriam.html

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