Broken Player

Inside the bellows, behind unmoving keys,
eighty-eight fingers of motionless weight
held her proof of harmony. Her paper-rolls;
a chronicle of life. All songs she once knew.
This was her tomb of inner workings,

her personal sanctum of hushed
melody and muted notes. Once she sang
from the sparkling harp, the curved
body of a walnut case. Once she carried
her music-box memory beside a tracker’s

bar, beyond touch, chords and clouds,
beyond the wounds of flesh and saints,
long ago into another life. A place
of arcs in the sky, of light converging
with light. There she moved easily,

barefoot and undressed. There she was fluid
and elegant without words. There her heart
was a pneumatic device that pressed wind
around eternal beings, void of thought
with the echo of hymns. Only the hum

from mouth-less souls through half-lit
moons of apricot stain. Over and over
she yearned for her phantom; a ghost
with flowers that grew deep in the womb
and nourished her ears with a chiming hush.

Sometimes she cleaned the splintering shell
and buffed the cover, tightly closed. A cloth
in her hands, she felt the tremble;
an uncontrolled shake that quaked her
frame. She’d sit at the bench, her hands

crossed neatly for a moment’s pause,
allowing herself another birth. So she might
experience that peculiar quiet; that deafening
silence of nothing and nothing. Until all
she heard was the sound of pianos, the voice

of ivory, past lives and bones.