The Piano

Full Moon
August 1, 2023

She dreamed that his grand piano, moved by an unseen hand, rolled onto the lawn with a price tag on it.  She wonders if he wants her to sell the piano, a source of pain and longing for the animal of his body to touch the keys, until he and piano were one body.  It sits in what was his office, photos of them sit on the once soaring lid. 

She told a friend once, she remembers, as she lays paint down thickly with a pallet knife, “that piano is his body to me, what I have left of his body, how could I sell it, yet it sits untouched.”

She mixes cerulean blue, white, phthalo blue and grey.  Runs the knife through all of them and swipes it across the canvas.  She warily approaches this longing, a wild animal curled up in the center of her heart, her lungs.  No room for breath.  Unrequited.  She prays it will alchemize into desire, hot and red, but then what?  She wants no other man or woman either.  She wants desire.  She wants to be desired.  Her heart heaves and swirls with confusion.

She picks up a brush, uncaps and squeezes a swirl of umber, burnt offerings she thinks, on the altar of this canvas.  This one is going to hurt.

The painter and the woman are one now, inseparable as they paint a thin, wavy line calling forth the piano, vibrating, ready to move.  The legs undulate with a life of their own.  Her heart wrenches as under her brush his spirit emerges sitting at the key board, body not here, not there, between.

She is caught as she has captured him in a blue grey mist, loving the whole of piano and spirit, remembering piano and man.  Her man.

She steps back, there he is.  Hunched over the keys, head bowed into the silence of the music.  One body.   How, she wonders, can an object one loves so, as an extension of the Beloved, hurt so much to look at, to feel, day in, day out.

She is not done. Or is she?  It is raw and unfinished, like her grief, like her heart, like her life.

She hears Elisabeth call them back to gathering in front of a screen, in this time of Covid, when all are sheltering in place.  But there is no shelter for her heart as she sits aching while all share their work for the day.

She turns the computer off.  Heavy silence.  Absence.  Yet a kind of presence, ineffable, yet palpable at the canvas piano.  She feeds her dog,  who slurps dinner in great gulps, the thirty second meal her niece calls it.  She stands at the kitchen sink, a peculiar loneliness shrouding her.  No one to ask, “how did it go today?”, can I see what you did?” as she washes her brushes thoroughly, straightening the bristles so they dry straight.

It is morning. Her heart is heavy.  She sits on the screened in porch, perched over the bowl of black birch, oaks, witch hazel, blooming mountain laurel.  The ferns wave in the breeze, always saying goodbye.  Her eyes search out the familiar portal  in the woods, opened by morning light, framed by two slender trees.  Distant and mysterious. She walks through. 

There is the blue canvas she painted the day before – slitting a portal in the blue grey mist she steps inside.  Plunging, floating in another world.  The soft light wraps her in welcome, in blessing, in freedom, in love, in bliss.  Like the light her mother sent to her after she died, a sign of her well being.  A light like no other. 

The air vibrates with soundings from the piano.  A whale call, homing her to her Beloved pod of one.  His song, never born, never dying, calling her through space.  Her heart returns the call.  They come together, his notes, her notes rising and falling with cries of greeting, ethereal bodies in a dance of reunion.  She has found him at his beloved piano.

Can I stay she asks him, can I stay.  His fingers move along the keys, sounding a melancholy no.

Soon though, soon.