Rooftops
01.24.07

I could always smell
the quivering sweat drops
of notes rapid-rising on the air
sounded when melancholic fathoms
settled in his chest.

“You could never keep a piano
on the roof, like in the movies,”
he mentioned on a Wednesday of reason
not so very long ago.
“The wood would warp with weather,
hard knots of distorted chords
forming on keys and strings.”

So he did what he could,
opening his windows
exchanging stale sorrow
for the safe indifference ever shifting
on the sidewalk below.

On some nights, Schubert was summoned,
the yellowed codex repainted sable.
Usually, though, the impromptu surety
of his own desolation came pitiless
up the fire escape, each fading,
unrecorded, into the smog.