Clair de Lune in the Dead of Winter

I.

Every Sunday when the sun started to bud

its head through the canopy of dead—speckled dogwoods, coffee-tongued

and morning medicated, she’d peel

back the dust covered fallboard

on her time-stained Bechstein,

like she was lifting the lid

off Pandora’s jar.

II.

Her fleshy skeletal instruments—

just bound bone in flickered white eggshell bounded off, across the rosewood soundboard. The glass-latticed sunroom where I watched, and she rarely ever spoke—quivered with a gusto as she warmed up

her nimble fingers. In her criticisms—

she was Monsieur Croche.

She would grab my hands and place them on the bare-polished mahogany and say: Close your eyes.

Feel the music, first.

Then you can play.

Behind paneled gold-floral,

with eyes shut wide.

She became Claude Debussy

in his third movement of Suite Bergamasque. Each note shivered my skull—as tiny-felt covered hammers

inside the belly,

struck steel strings.

III.

A player piano sits in its place now—

alone.

The capriccios and concertos

that once throbbed

throughout this house

are all lost with their host,

to the hollow harmonics

of frozen clocks,

still tolling.