Two Poems
Sixteen Things to Do with a Baby Grand Piano on a Rope
(1) Be Sisyphus. Pull it up hill. (2) Lasso Van Cliburn for piano teacher. (3) Watch Alfred Hitchcock’s The Rope. (4) Light the rope as fuse. Listen to the strings and hammers burn duets. (5) Tie yourself to the strings. Yell for Dudley Do-Right. (6) Let the piano swing like Tarzan in the jungle. (7) Tie the rope to your ankle. Throw the piano from a bridge. (8) Change your mind. Surf back to shore. (9) Let Tommy Smothers keep his pet chicken on your rope. (10) Yoyo. (11) Put a hook on the end of the rope. Take the piano deep sea fishing. (12) Watch Jane Campion’s The Piano. (13) Set the lid as a moose trap. (14) Piano piñata. (15) Tether the piano so it doesn’t join Penn & Teller’s props. (16) Drag the piano like a religion of rope burn.
Too Old for Fairies
Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse that demon? Or would you answer, 'Never have I heard anything more divine'?
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Another shot of Novocain or nitrous oxide would deliver a small eudemon
of relief. I want to keep my tooth, my yellow-rooted demoniac.
In my skull, I hear the sound of my molar being pulled.
I’ve gnashed my teeth too much at night, seeing demons.
The oral surgeon says, Did you notice a pop in your jaw
when your tooth cracked? No, I threw myself down—demonolatry.
If ever pain, joy and sigh must come again, I know this sequence.
I’ve lost a tooth after each parent died. Infected, demonized.
I have no children for whom to play Tooth Fairy. Again I wish
I had faced the contractions of childrearing demons.
If teeth represent decisions and I have lost some, will I have less
indecision or will each choice extract greater pandemonium?
No, your tooth is mine. You’re too old for fairies, Jari. My tooth plinks
into the dentist’s jar. The eternal hourglass turns. Deliver me, Demon Divine.
—Jari Thymian, Aurora, CO
