The Cold Piano

After you died, he couldn't face that room,
those strings, that bench, those keys.
The music had orphaned the song.
Your missing placemat made the table
lose a leg and there we stood --
a trinity of falling shelves
trying to be able oars.

Crickets played their homilies to hope
of course, but we were deaf.
Graves have ways of
stealing sunsets from the sky.
A father raising little girls,
pinning ribbons in their hair,
as he grew bald in every form
that mattered much.

Spiders ran a gamut of lace;
he hired a maid to dust.
We understood what dinner was
without your plate,
how sonnets turn staccato prose,
how nothing rhymes and daylight burns
and you can smell the cloth for miles
between the stretching silences.


The Open Casket

I pretend you're asleep
as I file past the rectangular box.
Elbowed along by weeping mourners
who pay their respects,
cross themselves against their sins,
adjust their ties, rush toward doors
for a glimpse of the sun
they are now beginning to doubt.

The service is short -- like mowers
plow and amputate a daisy's head.
Just lying there, you're magnets
plopped on the humming fridge,
carpe diem's grim reminder
hanging from a new silk blouse.
"Grab the music while you can"
is crawling from your pale lips.

Life can't stand to look at death --
the wounded bird we all become
frozen in permanent ice.
I wish they kept the casket closed,
so I could shut my stinging eyes
to colors of the coming sky
where cobalt blue is brief mirage.
I loved a hallway with no mirrors.


[Back]