Pennies and Spider’s Legs

For Auna

 

She invites and opens

The insides of memories

With bare toes

As keys cry out

A new color enters silence

The piano string’s grooved rivets

Unravel the heart

As only

An imagined harp with its colored suspensions

Would ask for a borrowed slice of music

Trained by the wind

Where fog and sea

Reluctantly polish

The ivory sealed into the song

 

She stands at the piano

A raven born from a canvas

Hair falling over her eyes

I saw the form of an immaculate child

Musical droplets resonated

Spirited sounds like dripping ink

Bleeding only onto the black notes

Easing the fear out of the minor chords

Allaying her reminders

The phantoms of childhood

Pipe-organ anxieties of a little girl

 

Still she stood

Like a cultured reed elegantly willowed

With beauty fluted through

Bare feet pressing brass pedals

Extending each note

Pulling the child in

With memories now different

Remembering the piano as

Inside the bloom of the flower’s bell

When the metronome

Expressed the cadence for future hopes

 

 

The music sends time backwards

She stands inhabiting what she would become

Not the mystical, naïve child

Who can forget?

The nails with glued-on pennies

Fingers that grew spider’s legs

 

Inside the memory’s instant

There stands

The woman now

Who creates the brushed-keys of novel art

Ink-black hair falls over her eyes

Hair dripping away

The painful squid-ink sweat

Of things that need to go

Blending the black and ivory

Erasing the fear

From the music of memories

 

She still invites:

The pauses

The rebellions

The jagged colors

The try-me eyes

The obsession to run

The intense desires

 

Arcs of emotion pulled me inward

Toward

I couldn’t look away

It was as real

As love can ever mix with hallucination

 

 

Attention mated with illusion

I felt two epochs converge

Sepia from a child’s photo

Where wonder cannot imagine that is you

 

And the screens that obsess

Pixelated elation

A modern portrait

Still not real

 

But here was the real soul standing there

Pennies on the nails disappearing

Spider legs jousting into real fingers

 

Then the dream became real

Hands became magic

Hands that made their own tools

Brushes with their myriad pallet

Music transformed to color

A painted orchestra

Open for the high octave space

Where raven’s wings open the door

To the unexpected gifts

Of the most passionate flying

 

Blue rivers reside

Inside the sky’s red cries

And then the music became a new color

A color you might not choose

Yet it is

Arched over with kaleidoscopic rainbows

Where attitude is now colored by self-love

And the piano’s voice rang out

Speaking and living in the colors of now

And tomorrow…