The Grand

by

Kathryn A. Kopple

Jacek Yerka

I am still a child without a piano.
My sister is a piano without ever being a child.

Without a piano, I would be exactly what I am,
not my sister, who does whatever a piano does.

My father actuates as a piano,
otherwise, he would be only a father.

My mother wants that piano to go out
and not come back till it finds a higher paying job.

To think, thousands of tusks once stream this way
from the coast to the factories of Connecticut.

One tusk for every hundred keyboards
bleached and lathed to create dazzling bridges.

Pianos look a lot like elephants, all heft
and grace and great round tops.

The one in our house rubs its back against the wall,
and out of its maw the glazed sounds

I hear every day my sister must conjure
her destiny, though she must stare far

into my father’s past to find it, as he imagines
Beethoven flogging the piano till it weeps

for joy, becomes Ode, exploding Glorias!
till the house can’t take anymore.

There’s no living with him when he’s like this,
my mother says and looks at me.

Hovered at my sister’s shoulder, my father says,
This is how you become immortal, beloved.

Credits:  "The Grand" first appeared in issue 47 of Sands Hill in 2003. 

In a Dark Time

by

Theodore Roethke

Franz Marc

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood—
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks—is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is—
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

Credits:  This poem may be found online at Poetry Foundation.