The Red Piano
Something rattles the windowpanes,
flings noisy bursts of gold, red, gold.
I can’t tell gunfire from fireworks.
At a bar, my friend Al lived through
armed robbery, no problem he thought.
Sirens veer into my neighborhood,
amping my heartbeat. But what I hear
as emergency is only the township’s Santa
waving from a slow-moving firetruck.
One year Al set off New Year’s explosions
in our backyard. I have old photographs—
a drink in Al’s hand, his wife Jeanne and me
in our fluffy hairdos, the men not gray yet,
not really. The neighbor who bragged
about guns moved away, leaving his son
and a rotating team of girlfriends.
Another neighbor had her dog
on a leash when a car hit and killed it.
In his last year, Al climbed to the roof
to clean gutters. Let’s go to Paris,
he said then. Perhaps if I kneel and press
my ear to a heating vent, I’ll hear
the old red piano, everyone singing,
toasting, the only explosion our laughter.
*
Barbara Daniels’ Talk to the Lioness was published by Casa de Cinco Hermanas. She also wrote Rose Fever and four chapbooks: Moon Kitchen, Black Sails, Quinn & Marie, and The Woman Who Tries to Believe. Her poems have appeared in Good River Review, Book of Matches, Neologism, Rust & Moth, Lake, Cider Press Review, and elsewhere.
She received four fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.