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.