Still Life With Mouse Torso and Miniature Grand Piano
by Sandra Meek
- Hawk-dropped, the body appears first
- as abrasion, a bruising of the concrete drive
- slight as noon’s shadow, as Icarus’s falling
- through flame and spectacle to the margin
- Breughel foregrounded in a sea
- of emerald oil.
- At ten, I taught myself to see
- only distance; I believed the world scaled
- far enough down might narrow
- toward grace, the human figured too
- outsized to enter. Miniature library, kitchen,
- music room: each weekend I’d bevel, and stain,
- and glue: the piano
- the finale, dark walnut gloss spanning my hand, lid extended
- like a broken wing—
- More glissando
- than fester, the torso unzips
- to an ivory question, spine
- levitating free
- of its shock of slate fur.
- After a week, barely a gray smudge
- mars the driveway’s grainy canvas.
- However I had imagined my life
- was elaborate as lace, and woven
- mostly of air.
- No spoil; only vacancy.
- Height, and length, and bend, all curl
- to a tiny shepherd’s hook, nearing
- erasure, insects devouring
- distance, what seemed
- sanctuary, what let God
- forget us, perhaps, though most
- drought-driven days I just believe in heaven
- eternally empty. Cloudless
- from here, though the weather
- says rain, an illuminated map
- glossing a small shadow’s gathering
- away from a coast
- saw-toothed with fishing villages
- beneath the radar
- homing in on the storm far from earth’s shudder
- at fault line, the swell
- first merely gentling the farthest-out boats
- forty-three minutes will surge
- to harbor wave, the bone-white land
- going under.
Note: “Harbor wave” is the literal English translation of tsunami.