And I Will Tell You a Story

how the tree grew out of the piano

how the piano came to float

upright

out of the house on Anthracite Ave.

during those three days in June

our Agnes Flood splintered the door

wide-freeing the black, the white

keys from their silent, undone

sostenuto extending down the street

how the piano came to the traffic light

corner of Center & Main

how it crossed, made it as far as

the dike where it struck, lifted then lodged

into that bank of earth

the one that had failed at its first

duty to keep the necessary river out

how the piano stayed

unnoticed by the dump trucks bridging the borough

those weeks after

the waters receded & everything by then was

mud & dust & rust & reek & piles

of the ruined & disheveled

a dissonance from every curb

prolonged

how the piano remained

(seemingly) sight unseen

how silt from the spring thaw pressed in

rush & deposit

made a windowbox of its hammers & strings

how an accidental samara—maple or ash—

settled, split, grew a green

sprout in one year

tremelo stick in two

a sapling by five that would have taken

stronger arms than Samson’s to root out

how the tree grew & grew & grew

how a lonely woman one day walking

weeding the dike of trash

came upon it marooned

parted the foliage, scooped

her fingers into the damp

once hornbeam chords now crumbling

compost from felt

noted it was a piano

noted it accompanied a tree

carried a ladder from her home on the Flats

to lean against

to climb inside its quiet

études, serenades

climbed into the honky-tonk, topmost branch

where she saw

yet again

for the first time

yet again

time & again

the river that remained

pedaling horizontal

over-strung & tonic

loud/blood

artery & vein

one more world

between

the sharp, the flat

Six Degrees

I was on the Coast Starlight,

the end point Salinas,

then a rental and the highway, 101,

that unwind of ribbon,

Monterey to Big Sur.

But first, the territories and my pop-bead ears as the train

climbed off the grid

through the Cascades

and into the Dunsmuir dark.

Violins over the PA were evening’s vespers,

Mozart keeping score,

and the cough down the hall

might have been anything:

the predictable wheeze from a pack-a-day,

asthma, my coal miner grandfather spitting up lung.

By morning, the train closed on Oakland, a station named for a writer.

But first we had to wait—

for freight to cross a fret,

rail bridge above the tidal flats,

a mothballed fleet in the estuary at Sasson Bay.

I watched and wished the hard, sad stone

that is the bottom of my heart

would float up and out,

mingle with the eucalyptus tang, its gray and silver

peeling everywhere along this siding,

turn California la-la and light.

Instead, faded

American flags tied with faded

yellow ribbons spiraled

a street lamp in Martinez.

We passed people fishing in the shallows,

tents a skyline above rubble,

a great blue heron flapping, its neck pulled in.

On through the C & H sugar refinery at the born-again Crockett station.

Bake sales were surely held to pay for its new gilt sign!

Berkeley’s Xanadu was a chalkboard—“Whitey Repent”—

and West Oakland boasted a monument

to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

We barreled toward the San Andreas Fault.

Then slowed.

A ten-mile per hour crawl, the conductor told us,

because a man was sitting on the tracks,

refused to get off.

Maybe his head was a nuclear reactor.

Maybe he played the ukulele in his high school band.

Maybe he wished to be hanging instead—there’s comfort in crowds—

with the dozen chambray shirts like scarecrows on a fence

behind one more corrugated, windowless shack.

The others in the sleeper car crowded their panes,

rubbernecking, righteous: It isn’t us.

I was already absent,

my naked body flying like a Chagall bride

through the parlor car—

forget about switchbacks and real time,

right into a Roman bath

cantilevered over the Pacific.

Where Ursa Major coddles, a velvet bowl above,

and my sturm und drang’s abandoned,

no, more like dashed, to the rocks below,

one evening’s soak to leach any guilt

from these pores after I’ve traded the tides

for his touch to shiver my gangplank,

dip me below the firmament in a waltz.

And I haven’t even gotten to my next extraordinary:

thousands of monarch butterflies

on their way from the inter-mountain region of Utah

to winter along the central coast.

The next day, they will roost

in the photinia outside my room.

How they’ll rise—tutti and con brio, then surround—

no, really, crown—

my lucky,

undeserving

head.