PAD Challenge: Warming Up III

 And two more before the official start of National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo):

T-minus 2: Write a poem with the title "Almost _______ ."

Almost There
 
In his dream - or is it a nightmare? -
he is taking the kids on vacation,
when about halfway to their destination
they begin to ask, "Are we there yet?"
"Not yet," he replies.
 
Then they cover another fourth
of the distance to their objective.
"Are we there yet?"
"Not yet."
Another eighth of the total miles:
"Are we there yet?"
"Almost there."
 
You can see where this is going.
Like Sisyphus, this poor dad
will never accomplish his goal -
another sixteenth, another thirty-second,
always getting nearer on a long curve
that approaches, but never quite reaches,
the little town of Asymptote.

T-minus 1: Write a "warmup" poem.  I also used the head-start prompt from Maureen Thorson's NaPoWriMo blog: take an image from any work of art on the Metropolitan Museum of Art website and write a poem based on it. I thought of "warming up" in a musician's sense so I looked for examples with instruments. Still Life: Violin and Music by William Michael Hartnett, which I have seen in person in the museum, has always struck me with its realism, but I took a deeper dive into its details and came up with this poem. (I may eventually try to turn it into a sonnet.)

Warming Up
 
Last week a wedding and this week a wake -
his fiddle hangs by a string from the door.
It's been a trusted friend through it all -
the varnish worn thin around its bridge.
 
It doesn't matter how I feel, he thinks,
I need to warm up. So he takes it down,
and the flute, for he's handy with it as well,
and the dog-eared music, a plaintive ballad
about a lover's death, which some call
"Saint Kevin."  He rosins his bow and begins.
 
The words sing in his head:
By that lake whose gloomy shore...
Soon the cold in the strings has gone,
as the banked fire in his kitchen
keeps out the chilly March air.

Here's the painting: