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Sport 37: Winter 2009

The Dying Man Plays His Pianola

The Dying Man Plays His Pianola

Those puffing feet, those paddles, sculling
a slow boat with music jaunty in the air, his own
body's bellows bleeding, his panting feet.

Magic from New York, gleaming, glamorous even,
entirely new, renewed, resplendent perforation.
Pipes and pumps and paddles permitting sound.

Music of the brass tubes, the puffing silk-paper
bellows, each a breathing lung for the machine.
Driven air reading gaps in the line and

making Chopin. A factory of corridors and tunnels,
almost a city, a production line of mazurkas.
Air the glutton that beats on wires strung

in the black box, insisting upon tune, air building
notes, building phrases, pounding the ear's drum.
Everything in resonance, the harmonic teeth

driving each cog, forcing the spindle around,
the roll of paper punctuated by absence, and
absence activating song. His own lungs

leaking air, the paper rolls misread and sending
dud notes through his blood, his engineer's feet.
All the pumps in the world insufficient for now.

*

page 87

The grand act of forgetting, his body decrepit
and diminishing. Silence the only point of thought,
the finality of air forced through tubes

scorching the paper that carries the crescendo
with it, a holy pyre consuming what it reads.
His mind rich with trains and elevators,

retracting walls, the structures that plead his cause.
The essentials of passage, the very why of being.
Here's what he knows. The making and working

of machines, the paths the air follows, slamming
a hammer down. The music he cannot catch,
it out-runs his hands. There is the mystery,

his disappearing body an unsolved experiment,
fingers that no longer follow. Scrolls of notes
catching in his throat and sending static through

his mouth, coughing now his punctuation, coughing
now a new syntax, one that plays tunes here
and next year, re-creating the grammar of oblivion.

The holes burned by cancer, or radiation,
or both. Fix one, another comes, perdendo. Crank him
through the pianola, then he'll puff out a tune.

*

My friend, he sang six songs before breakfast,
like a bird all got up in its finery, all dressed for love,
a harp on which his breath would have the final word.