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Poetry
Art
Case
Your
body tells a story:
the
ink-faces and curlicues of your life
are
carved, imprinted like tattoos
or
hieroglyphs speaking
silent
histories, and speaking them forward
as
you move across the years; and through
a
century, your body
sings:
exultant as
the
eager fingers
that
touch you, that play
and
press your warring shades…
Body of black
and
white levers, Italian
walnut
and mahogany
skin,
you sing stark colors, and they,
tempered
by an insidious sun
or
an incandescent lamp,
still
burst forth in the Gold Room
that
is your royal house;
and from your austere hues
sounds
of worlds are spun, colorful
as
the co-eds of many generations
who
have lived with you to create
and
re-create their own womanly
stories.
And the body can tell
many
stories, as bodies
that
mingle have their own,
have
their colorful shared tales,
where
one’s curves and angles end
and
another’s begin…
And so our own songs, our stories
spin
and swell and spin—
bard
becomes one with instrument,
sensation
with sound,
body
with song,
fantasy
with truth…
In the Gold Room where we played,
which
stories have you told,
which
have I engraved?
It should be no secret:
I
was a princess
gothic
in your golden room,
my
small fingers,
soft
like the rain’s,
crept
on your keys
as
down the back
of
my silken corset,
trembling
Thinking
fondly of the 1913 Steinway art case piano that I had played for many
years as a resident of the Martha Cook Building in Ann Arbor, Michigan