Piano
Jena Woodhouse
1.
The sound of your piano…
Don’t leave me in silence!
The sound of your piano
has been an angel in residence,
tuning the instrument of the psyche
each morning since we met.
Once, for a season that seemed
heaven-sent, we roamed streets known
to Socrates, where a temple gleamed,
a blanched vision of columns
in an apotheosis of keys.
Rehoused in the mansion of tears
unshed, the piano moved closer,
we sat back to back; you duelled
with your demons; I – a mute
keyboard, whose symbols danced
mockingly, white upon black.
Now the notes travel a long corridor;
you practise in solitude: preludes,
fugues. Don’t leave me alone,
where cacophony’s beast from the mind –
numbing deep takes me down
2.
Piano
There was a time when pianos
came from forests – ivory, ebony:
the eloquence of elephants and trees
and of the seven seas, the whales
that sob and sing slain for baleen
to make the finest springs.
I remember how you’d sit,
serving your apprenticeship,
patiently releasing fugues
and preludes from reluctant keys,
or silently communing with the demon
deep within, resting your flushed forehead
against wood-grain polished to high gloss,
reflecting you as enigmatic twin.
Your piano once took wing,
like you, to distant isobars,
a heavy-bodied albatross
migrating to the great south land.
Now I contemplate the space
your arms once spanned, still resonant –
the chambers of a heart that breaks,
an instrument that yearns for sound…
a clearing in the jungle where ghostelephants
seek out old trails, a forest
glade where lofty trees once swayed,
a sea bereft of whales…
