“Dies Irae” by Elisabeth Vodola

What's in a piano? Awkward shape:
Body stiffly bloated, protruding sound,
Like the womb's weird wandering,
Bleeding into alien cavities,
Strangling, distorting.

And the keys, ordered black and white,
Like newspapers, nuns, streets;
Yet the cat's colors are random,
Liquid black and white, like countries on a map,
As she pitches into my dreams.

Yes, it was with the piano, the piano, that it all began.

What innocent atom, twirling in the house,
Of life, of eyes and ears, and bone,
And wood and air, and paper on the walls--
The flowered, pleated chintz,
Old pewter, new plastic;
Loss as yet only sketched in around familiar forms,
The tiny silken ribs of a red taffeta dress
Cut on the bias--
What substance didn't the violation reach?

Notes jeered, sneered, leered;
Notes lurched and reeled around
Until every drawer and cupboard opened on Noah's nakedness.

Then death screamed through the house like a bullet,
Atoning, absolving, hallowing the very places of privation
As stations on the way to the present:

The past is all the present really owns,
Its claims upon the future merely loans;
Redemption therefore terminates in now,
With what its powers of escrow will allow.