Crisp, and tentatively,
the hours snap one after the other
like a file of tensed strings.
White song lifts from his fingers
skittering spider-like across the ivories
as the figurines shudder
to the resonance of certainty.
Flutter of eye, twitch of lip—
a finger trips on a misplaced key.
He cringes,
and each entranced corner
gasps like a child
when suddenly
the lights have went out.
But what note? How soft, now?
How stiff? What answer drifts
from across the room
where a chipped Virgin statuette
stares back with hushed rebuke?
He pounds at the keyboard,
and something moaned
like a loose, hollow chord.
Must have been the piano.
Must have been him.
Must have been both
as he stuck his eyes out
and the seconds throbbed
in an upsurging tempo,
crescendo.
Outside on the street,
his students might have heard it all,
all the things he would relentlessly deny:
One would look at the back of his hand
and remember it swell
with so much tolerance.
One would clap his hands vigorously
and shake his head.
One would but nod
and quickly walk away.
The piano, a solid, luminous shadow,
suddenly becomes a mirror of it all,
his face for one thing, a visage of weariness,
cheeks hollowed by a certain loneliness,
stern eyes like old fruit
stuffed on the sockets.
He bangs his head on the keyboard,
letting the cruel rhymes flit here and there.
But still an impossible faith
made him grope for a chord,
excruciating to complete
the aborted recital. Pain,
always his slow hum of redemption.
The piano glints.
Flutter of eye, twitch of lip.
And so the strings keep on breaking
slowly, one by one.
And another press
may strike
his final,
echoing note
way all too sudden,
way all too soon.
