ISSUE 13: SPRING 2011

Overtures

You matured young. Spent too much time in a basement room with sombre pulled shades, where your parents hid the piano like some old persistent wound. The world was fascinating even as it ignored you, dusty sunlight across your fingers in stroking tones. Yellow sachets on the windowsill in baskets, the electric orange tabby, yawning cavernous and often. You knew the truth, sometimes, when it slipped out and lay like a fish on the top of the keys. Because it was always already three o’clock in the afternoon, you were supposed to have been doing something else with your day. Not playing a sonata for the people on the street, if only they could hear it. You knew it wasn’t enough, it was never going to be enough. The look about you of someone who cares too much, hunched into the bars and notations that streaked the pages. Realizing even then what you were doing, quietly saluting the years as they passed.