Infinitely Stranger
I thought I could not love this seascape more,
this congruence of salt, iodine, wet hair
of the sea, but a piano appeared on the cold winter
sand, dumbstruck in reeds beneath the cliff
by the church camp. Soundboard and keyboard.
Hammers and coiled strings. A coverless, legless baby
grand. Its bleached wood, bleaching whiter. Plashing
sounds, wearing within. Graffiti circles the curve
of the frame. Its meaning, indecipherable, and more so
than yesterday. It was six leggy boys, the villagers say,
carried the case along the bluff by the strawberry fields.
It was those boys, those boys, who tossed its symphony
to the sand, for gulls in tuxedos, dancing sandflies, their
long buffets of shiny kelp. So ragged and ravaged,
the piano sits in sun, under cloud cover, fills with water,
lets it out again collecting seabird relics, fluid breath.
Fairy people leave arrangements of sand dollars and wrack,
rocks on a tombstone. The piano becomes one with
the weather, soothsayer for attentive ghosts, fearless children
who have tossed their shoes aside. The curious, bored, romantic—
each day the waters sigh as they gather like tides. I thought
I could not wonder more. But like all voices we strain to hear
in our stone churches filled with unmoved pews, the piano is
silent. Whatever distance is measured here, the answer is yes.
this congruence of salt, iodine, wet hair
of the sea, but a piano appeared on the cold winter
sand, dumbstruck in reeds beneath the cliff
by the church camp. Soundboard and keyboard.
Hammers and coiled strings. A coverless, legless baby
grand. Its bleached wood, bleaching whiter. Plashing
sounds, wearing within. Graffiti circles the curve
of the frame. Its meaning, indecipherable, and more so
than yesterday. It was six leggy boys, the villagers say,
carried the case along the bluff by the strawberry fields.
It was those boys, those boys, who tossed its symphony
to the sand, for gulls in tuxedos, dancing sandflies, their
long buffets of shiny kelp. So ragged and ravaged,
the piano sits in sun, under cloud cover, fills with water,
lets it out again collecting seabird relics, fluid breath.
Fairy people leave arrangements of sand dollars and wrack,
rocks on a tombstone. The piano becomes one with
the weather, soothsayer for attentive ghosts, fearless children
who have tossed their shoes aside. The curious, bored, romantic—
each day the waters sigh as they gather like tides. I thought
I could not wonder more. But like all voices we strain to hear
in our stone churches filled with unmoved pews, the piano is
silent. Whatever distance is measured here, the answer is yes.
Jessica Cohn’s poems appear in Comstock Review, Crab Creek Review, Tar River Poetry, The Journal of Undiscovered Poets; at Rattle, RavensPerch, Spillway, Split Rock Review, What Rough Beast, and elsewhere. She lives in California after earlier chapters in the East and Midwest.
Art: First Strawberries, oil on paper, Paulina Swietliczko