Erica Jong - The Keys lyrics

Broken ivories playing the blue piano of the sea. We have come from the bitter city to heal ourselves. We have come looking for a patch of beach not yet built into a fortress of real-estate greed, a coral reef not yet picked clean of buried treasure, not yet bare of birds. The first night in the Keys, I dreamed I was a bird soaring over a hilly city, soaring & dipping like a gull or egret. & I thought: 'Ah- this is a flying dream! Enjoy it.' But I really think that my soul has been transported for a night into the body of a bird & I was flying. I woke up exhausted, arms weary, eyes red. The beach was dazzling with its white sand, the sun blinding, & I seemed to know the palm trees from above as well as below. They root in the sand with elephant feet, yet they also root their delicate fronds in air. & these are a comfort as you fly half bird, half human through a dream of sky. Everything was new to a spirit so divided between two kingdoms. The water was alive with fish, the air with birds & palm fronds, clouds, thunderous presences of rain gathering & parting, & fiery sun playing through. I knew that I stood on a patch of earth connected to the sky, that my heart beat with the sea, that my arms moved with the clouds, that my flesh was finally irrelevant though it surrounded me as the case of a piano surrounds its strings, while the fingers play on the ivory keys & the human music rises to the sky.