Iron-hearted Piano
When I found this crooked house
that seemed as if it meant to fly
(others thought it wanted to explode--
what sane woman would so delight
in this abode?), I charmed its builder
into handing me the key, and entered.
Its rooms were choked with vestiges
of desperate days, years-old rations
of canned vegetables and military meat,
drug-saturated lusts infixed in unsealed plaster,
tequila vomit solid in velvet upholsteries.
Before I settled, I smudged perversity
away, sang and wafted sage and ceremony,
exorcising until just one obstacle to sanity
remained--this vast fire-damaged piano,
burnt upright, elephantine and tuneless,
weird innards iron and indestructible.
I've moved a dozen instruments easily
in other lives, from home to home,
but this vault of unvoiced bitter notes
has become a hole so black and heavy
all proximate levity gravity becomes.
I'm forced to sidle left and right to pass it.
Cursing its persistence, I waste entire afternoons
concocting strategems, hypothesizing
paper fulcrums. But the iron-hearted piano
remains unmoved, immovable, sinking into the boards.
11:48:30 AM 
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