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…
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