My Mother’s Piano

by Rosalind Rousseau

Tossed in a dumpster by two burly men

clearing out the abandoned house

where my mother and grandmother lived,

the old piano crashes and cracks against

tables, chairs, books, linens, and all other

remnants of ninety years spent collecting,

ultimately, dust and debris— the end of

all things and us. Her piano is carted off

with the rest of the unworthy waste and ruin.

It’s not an artwork or even a relic.

The trash compactor is a vulture

sucking bones. Already, its skeleton

has decayed—three stubborn keys stick

or don’t play at all, the rest of them

chipped and flat. One wooden leg

wobbles, and the worn piano face

bears scratches from before I was born.

I don’t know much about pianos,

but I assume the keys are difficult

to destroy, still singing as they break,

a strangled moan of strings snapping,

hammers striking, soundboard groaning

as it ruptures, sawdust saturating the air,

of hammers, dampers, wires, springs

fracturing to their smallest elements—

filings, splinters, shavings, cellulose.

Decomposition is a requiem sung

by a remorseless choir. When it’s over,

the mangled wood is little more than

a mass of shredded pulp lying on a

scrap pile, going back to the ground

from whence it came, wood and bone,

hollow sound. I don’t know why I thought

it would be mine. My mother’s proof

so little in life occurs the way it ought to.