How I Came To Drink My Grandmother’s Piano
by Kathleen Norris
It has to do with giving,
and with letting go,
with how the earth rotates
on its axis
to make an oblate spheroid.
It has to do
with how it all comes ’round.
There was a piano
in my grandmother’s house.
I inherited it,
but never learned to play.
I used it as a bookshelf
and dust collector
and finally gave it to a church up the street.
I was snowed in at a trailer house
in Regent, North Dakota,
when Rita offered me a glass
of dandelion wine.
“That’s some glass,” I said,
much too fancy for our thrown-together meal
of hamburgers and fried potatoes.
“Yes, isn’t it?” she replied,
fingering the glass pattern.
“A friend gave it to me.
Someone had given it to her,
but she never used it.”
I began to hear that piano
as Rita poured the wine.
The dandelions spun around:
glad to be yellow again,
glad to be free of the dark.
