Keyboard

A disembodied piano. The headphones allow
The one who touches the keys a solitude
Inside his music; shout and he may not turn:

Image of the soul that thinks to turn from the world.
Serpent-scaled Apollo skins the naive musician
Alive: then Marsyas was sensitive enough

To feel the whole world in a touch. In Africa
The raiders with machetes to cut off hands
Might make the victim choose, "long sleeve or short."

Shahid Ali says it happened to Kashmiri weavers,
To kill the art. There are only so many stories.
The Loss. The Chosen. And even before The Journey,

The Turning: the fruit from any tree, the door
To any chamber, but this one -- and the greedy soul,
Blade of the lathe. The Red Army smashed pianos,

But once they caught an SS man who could play.
They sat him at the piano and pulled their fingers
Across their throats to explain that they would kill him

When he stopped playing, and so for sixteen hours
They drank and raped while the Nazi fingered the keys.
The great Song of the World. When he collapsed

Sobbing at the instrument they stroked his head
And blew his brains out. Cold-blooded Orpheus turns
Again to his keyboard to improvise a plaint:

Her little cries of pleasure, blah-blah, the place
Behind her ear, lilacs in rain, a sus-chord,
A phrase like a moonlit moth in tentative flight,

O lost Eurydice, blah-blah. His archaic head
Kept singing after the body was torn away:
Body, old long companion, supporter -- the mist

Of oranges, la-la-la, the smell of almonds,
The taste of olives, her woolen skirt. The great old
Poet said, What should we wear for the reading -- necktie?

Or better no necktie, turtleneck? The head
Afloat turns toward Apollo to sing and Apollo,
The cool-eyed rainbow lizard, plies the keys.