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The baby is squalling so loud
I don’t hear the plunk-plunk-plink
on the other side of the secondhand store.
Then the baby hushes itself, listens,
like that piano is the only sound
in the universe.
The young mother takes her cranky child
out of the shopping buggy, parks it on her hip,
heads toward the music. I follow.
There she is: a tall girl with bony
shoulders and wild-ass hair pounding
those yellow keys, one scuffed shoe punching
the foot pedal, playing music somebody wrote
five hundred years ago for violins,
flutes, horns. Music rolls off her fingers
like creek water pouring over rocks.
First it’s me, the baby and the young mother,
her forgetting all about diaper rash and me
letting go of the past-due rent.
Another woman, looking like somebody’s
history teacher, wanders up and stands
near the old piano. A pudgy man in a uniform
with his name on the pocket taps out notes
on his khaki thighs.
A little girl plays ballerina to the music.
An old woman, half smiling, perches on a sofa arm,
yellow-white hair floating like it hears the music, too.
A teenage boy who should be in school vibrates
with music that will not let him stay still.
The music winds down and she gives those keys
one final shout with her strong fingers and stops dead.
When applause breaks out, she jumps
like she didn’t know she had an audience,
she was that lost in the music. One by one,
we walk up, say our thanks.
She can’t even meet our eyes.
As the young mother walks away, she says
to no one, or to the One who hears everything,
I swear I’d let my own baby go hungry
and give that girl every dime I owned
if it would be enough
to buy her that piano.
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