"I took that piano apart piece by piece. The sound/

board was cracked & it would not stay tuned." — my father

Some days he watched her, her back

perpendicular to the bench, wrists lifted,

as they should be, from the edges of the keys.

The music populated our home, as though

suddenly they had forty children more, the new ones

dancing in tiny, all-over dots around the three

they did have who sat, enraptured, quiet finally,

and listened. My father stopped then, too, stopped

the fast he was accustomed to and smiled, slight,

knowing something secret, a man in love.

Other times his eyes didn't see, or they saw

financial security, a far-off land, unreachable

with music, his teacher's salary, or the extra

change he made delivering bread, his mornings

not for sleep but for keeping our four heads

pressed into pillows as he went out

into the night and drove loaves from factory

to doorstep, then entered the classroom

somehow awake enough to show

how the derivative of the cosine is negative

the sine. Sometimes her notes were a song

that foretold our downfall. Taxes each year

took more than he could afford. With each dollar

gone, there went a new shoe, here came the thread

my brother used to sew a shirt that passed

from father to son to brother to me. In those notes,

in her strict wrists, in the minor descending key,

she made the soundtrack of our fleeting home:

togetherness depreciated at an insolvable rate

per year, as Mom stayed here and Dad went there—

until five had reached a hundred

and we were dissolved into the last,

lilting notes of the song.

I took that piano apart,

my dad wrote,

piece by piece the sound—

the sound of her playing stayed too long

in his head, so with his hands he took it out

until the song was wood again.