One
Pianos
I saw them as a child,
in the houses of people my parents knew,
each one sulking in a darkened room
beneath arrangements of family portraits.
There I’d lift the lip
that pouted over chipped and yellowed teeth
and slightly press the lowest key
enough so that the bass note hummed through me.
I never heard the hours
of tortured practice or those mornings when
dusting hands stopped to tour again
the foreign shore of a half-remembered strain.
So much that wasn’t played,
the silence resonating like the dusk
that ushers out the fall, and yet
the portraits in their frames have multiplied.
Furniture now of friends,
undisturbed and undisturbing, the strings
ease further out of tune against
the padded hammers waiting to be sprung.
The Mummy’s Curse
“We’d settled in to watch The Mummy’s Curse,”
the pastor at my father’s funeral
informed us, speaking of his Dublin youth
and to our fear of everlasting life.
A silent film projector that his uncle
owned was set up in the front hall parlor
where everyone could see. They drew the shade,
a makeshift screen, which blocked the city lights,
and waited to be scared. When soon, undead,
somnambulant, the mummy left its tomb,
trailing its banners of embalmer’s gauze,
the room filled with expected gasps and shrieks.
“But then we heard these otherworldly moans,
and more with every step the monster took.
The moans grew loud—a chorus from beyond.”
They pushed the bravest of them out the door
and there he saw, like frozen carollers,
some passersby who, mesmerized in fright
by what they witnessed played out on the shade,
shared in the fear of those who watched indoors:
all scared of what was on the other side.
“But that was death made animate,” he said,
“and rightly feared, not any kind of life.”
That was in Florida, my father’s final home.
The pastelled friends, whom he had hardly known,
had come to pay respects. The following day,
we took him north, to where we used to live.
Once, since then, I had some business there
and made a side trip back to tend the grave.
Recent rains had soaked our family plot,
a low spot in the village cemetery
where the marker sat, a small boat moored
amid a large and motionless flotilla.
But there would be no rising from the dead.
I thought of what the pastor had implied,
and what my brother, later, graveside, said,
whispering, “Everyone we knew is here.”
To prove him wrong, I shook the spring chill off
and stuck a flower in the muck before
I drove away to look for those I knew
had staked their claims not far from here and where
I’d seen them last, when we were all still young
and on the cusp of things not named or known.
The maple-lined road I’d driven countless times
strobed in flickering bands of sun and shadows;
familiar houses shrank behind additions.
I had my bearings then that day but no
directions, and I wound up out of town
at an orchard farm I’d known of as a boy
to see if they might have the lost addresses
of those who in my mind were so nearby.
The woman working the syrup and cider shop
looked up and asked me how I was. “I’m fine,”
I said. “We haven’t seen you in a while,”
she grinned, telling me her maiden name.
And then I understood the sculptors’ claim
of finding the shape within the stone, and saw
the girl I’d known twenty-five years before.
We talked a while about our lives, our jobs,
before she told me where I had to go.
But even now I can’t get past the fact
she recognized without a moment’s thought
my face unseen by her since I’d left school.
I, who traveled far afield, put streets
between us, languages and lives and years,
returned to her and to the rest, no doubt,
untouched by time. The change was theirs, it seemed,
incremental as an orchard’s growth,
but real. And I, like the unlucky dead,
would gladly move among them as their own.
Contrivance
National Arboretum
Consider these trees,
stationed on their slatted stands,
tended centuries
and trained to be small.
Root-pruned and limb-wired—such
techniques could enthrall
the quietest mind.
Appetite renders distant
the spruce one might find
clinging to a cliff
or maples burnished by wind,
positing as if
on