Play For Me

Play For Me

Your grandmother's ring,
a diamond propeller,
span light from your finger.
She, undaunted like you,
had flown point-to-point
around the globe,
alone but for a compass
and a flask of coffee.

Roof pricked through with rust,
the hanger stank of oil and pigeons.
Rods of sunlight falling like rain,
dust eddying in clouds around our feet.

You turned your smile from my face
past farm machines to where
a parlour piano, guano lace
along its top,
disclosed yellowed tusk.

You took my long, Indian shirt
from the bed that morning.
Naked beneath it, salty from the night
you sat and played "Blue Monk,"
dead notes, notes sour as bed-springs,
clustered one with the other.
Cubist chords you said,
traffic swerve and jive,
fistfuls of the city.

Strangers by time,
I saw you once more,
heard you once more,
without meaning to,
as is the way of things.
A concert in the wakeful,
watching hours.
You lit up on the screen
at a baby Steinway in L.A.,
singing a song I did not know,
in a style I did not like,
or feel.

You had on a black dress,
stars tumbled upon the shoulders,
your presence hypothetical,
points of coloured TV light,
half the world and a flight away.
Nothing of me against your skin,
Nothing of me in the music you played.