Embedded Files
Inspired by “Room in New York”
The concerto she plays is
familiar, but the pianist
is a shadowed specter
of the woman I used
to call my wife.
The piano once filled this studio
apartment with great gusto, but now
it sits dormant most of the year,
out-of-tune with its own uselessness.
She offers the upright one last
rhapsody, a desperate attempt
to ignite new life in the empty shell
of her long-lost beauty.
The movement strains our
silence as I hide my shame
behind the financial page,
hoping that a three point
gain for US steel
could close the chasm
across this round table.
With each motif, she intones
a star-studded night,
on the Brooklyn bridge,
a breeze softly singing
of young love,
as I held the heat
of her body in my arms,
and rested a single kiss
upon her blossoming cheek.
But the music shifts
to the storm that roared
outside our window
the night she returned home
to find another woman
in our bed.
With a soft decrescendo,
her arrangement fades like
the last sunlight sifting through
this high-rise skyline, and she
sluggishly rises from the piano,
the love we once shared,
now washed away with
the Hudson tide, and the
teardrops spotting the keys.
Zack Maluccio
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