From One Book Lover

Welcome to National Poetry Month! Here's a poem to start April's best festivities. For full -on poetry lovin', visit Hedgehog Lover , where it's all poetry, all month. Piano, New York Anywhere, like Idaho, women like our aunts would save quarters in cups or sell pies to buy one like this. They'd put it in a parlor for hymns and rub it with lemon oil each week, but here an old piano comes with the apartment, and no one will pay movers to hoist the beast out the window on ropes. We think we've no choice but to saw into its side that shines like the side of a horse. We save the real ivory keys in shopping bags and yank out the rack of purple felt mallets. Behind it all is a harp, tall as the whole piano and sprayed with gold. When wing nuts are loosened, the strings twang then hang slack. We stop for a moment, then rasp through its frame with hacksaws and drag the thing, piece by piece, down three flights of stairs to the street where ...

Years From Now When You Are Weary  and worn out, wondering how you'll pay a bill or make the rent or meet a deadline set by some thoughtless boss—and kid, such days will come—remember yourself at five: hair light from the sun or just from being young, new lunchbox pasted with butterflies, how you hung your backpack on a hook, then wouldn't let me take your picture on the first day of school, sending me out of that classroom, to the car, to my job where a pair of bats flapped in the hallway. Bats may be just bats, but one darted into my office, quick as the boxer's head that bobs and weaves and never gets hit. It landed and hung from the drapes, upside down, as you hung in my body for a while. Bats are not the only flying mammals. That afternoon in line for the bus, you cried, so tired you thought you'd fall asleep and miss your stop. Years from now, child, in some helpless dusk, remember that fatigue but how you made it...