Kate Camp
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The piano was something she played with her hands
her hands, of all things
it was full of tiny hammers dark
body of a whale
a piece of musical furniture
and she the Russian doll on a too-small
chair dedicated the song to her mother, small
turn of the head, her hands
not pressing the ivory furniture
but seeming to land and alight, things
at once heavy and weightless as a whale
moving through the ocean dark.
We listened in the dark
confines of the bar, that small
place below the surface, as in the whale
Jonah reached, his blind hands
touching not mere things
but the body’s living furniture
that furniture
in which life sits at home in the dark.
It was one of those things
that when I searched the small
household of my bag I couldn’t put my hands
on a pen so piano whale
was all I kept that night, piano whale
and how the furniture
was cut short so people rested their hands
on the floor, squatted in the dark,
a crowd of warmly dressed folk singers at small
stature. These are the things
I am saving, the things
that surface to breathe air like the whale.
In Alaska my father saw a small
grizzly emerge from the furniture
of its winter, its long dark
claws, its paws, its hands.
What are hands, are things
to that wintering bear, dark piano, whale.
The world, a doll’s house with its small furniture.
