Robert Pinsky - Keyboard lyrics

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 k** 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 k** 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.