Begin As A Child

Begin As A Child

Begin with your legs swimming under the seat.
Feel your bare thighs stick to the piano bench.

Press the woven patterns of a rag rug into soft varnish.
Watch your legs grow until your heels rest on carpet.

Balance coins on the back of your hands as you practice
until a president's silhouette is imprinted on your skin.
Shake a feathered spear at the moon. Remember to buy carrots
for the horses whose hooves you lift as you teach yourself to count.
Tie messages to the ankles of pigeons. Reach through
the minutes cast off from generations of white kitchen egg timers.

What you want is somewhere under water
in the teeming life moving through the shadows
of eroding banks, amid the dangling roots of trees.
It cannot be caught from a bench.

You will not feel the cold rounded line
of the water's surface tension
rise around the skin of your body.
It isn't until you touch bottom
and smoky clouds of sand swim around your ankles
that you will begin to understand.

When your legs have grafted themselves to the pedals of the piano
like artificial joints surrounded by veins, encased in fascia, and fed
by the coming and going of blood. When it's your own voice
slipping through the white fence of elephant teeth and the grooves
in the green and white felt hammers almost match the whorls on
your fingertips. You have become the piano.