Broken Music

Every turn I took in the city

pressed me deeper into the warren

of what I hadn’t said, the words

thickening, constricting like a throat

as I moved through the streets,

oblivious to traffic and high walls,

the rain gutters’ crooked mouths

staining the pavement, human faces

mooning past me, indifferent,

eclipsing my silence

with their phones, their apparitions

floating—where?—and everyone,

everyone talking to the air.

Until around a new corner

on a narrow street I’d never seen

a piano began to play from above

a window-muffled music

at odds with itself, the rush of notes

splintering like glass across a floor

then picked back up, piece

by piece—first one hand sorting

along the keys, then the other

joining, out of step, irreconcilable,

unpunctuated by frustration,

or shame, but stung with the urgency

to make what couldn’t yet

be made. How could anyone learn

their way out of such blunder,

how could any song be gathered

from those shards grating

like something lodged in a shoe.                

My ear cocked into the air,

I thought of floating up, balloon-like,

to look. I felt cartoonish,

a marvel of the last century’s

animation already out of date.

I could have gone on like that,

listening, loosening into the song,

but then the piano stopped.

My ears filled with waiting—

car horns and chatter, the wheeze

of a stopping bus, the city going

about its filthy exclamations,

its abandon. The window

darkened as the player shut

the light over the sheet music,

and it reflected another window

across the street that in turn

reflected a bit of sky, a plane’s

bright sideways thought

trolling across the pane 

music once broke through—

delirious and awful and unabashed,

and so unlike what I’d wanted to say

swollen now, a contrail

coming extravagantly undone,       

or a balloon full of glass.