Stars shiver in the cobalt sky
My fingers quiver over the keys
When I finally touch them light as lace
It is like warm sugar in my throat.
Standing by the window, the night
Flutters through your white gown
And just for a second, an angel you become.
I hover over a rickety piano as heaven
Breezes through the curtains.
You tell me my Pleyel will arrive soon
But the doctors say I am already dead.
The moon that loiters outside my window
Reflects olive hills and willow trees
And splinters the floor with rivulets of light.
At a monastery in Spain
I grumble and weep over a polonaise
Struggling with shade and rubato and pain
Until I pass out and you whisk me away.
And yet everything breathes here
Like music the water, sand and clouds
A fantasia of nature, far from the Paris crowds.
Not long ago, you gave me poems and kisses
You smoked cigars and I played mazurkas in the salon.
Your fingers, once arpeggios of pleasure over my skin
Mop my feverish body with rags.
Between refrains I wheeze and cough
My phlegm is the color borscht.
And now I am your child, your little wounded fawn
Pale as a pierogi and broken like my chords.
When I die, cut out my heart
Preserve it in vodka and send it to Krakow
So I can live forever in the dawn.
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Sheila Luna studied poetry and nonfiction writing at Arizona State University. Her work has appeared in Sotto Voce Magazine and she is currently writing a memoir about her experience living in a remote corner of northwest Montana with a hermit. Besides arranging words and sentences on paper, she loves to arrange musical notes at her piano. She currently lives in her hometown of Scottsdale, Arizona, with her husband, where she enjoys the luxuries of running water and electricity.
