Towering in the dining room
like a fifth member of the family,
heavy and honky-tonk,
your weathered wooden glow
cast a golden light over us,
that became us, dulled ivory.

My brother and I learned to play you,
scales then sonatinas that our father
hummed while cooking dinner, hums still.
My mother took you up at fifty,
sat down to the rebirth of our childhood,
plunking away the faltering grace of chords.

Music comes to a family in strange ways,
sometimes more like the haunting whir
between harmonics and silence
than the notes themselves.
When we were building our house,
the contractor mentioned The Black Cat,
an old jazz club from the Thirties
for the North River blacks,
burned to the ground on this very site.

I have dreamt the wailing of saxophones
and the river-sway of dance steps and piano,
a nameless beauty, not Steinway,
not Baldwin, but ours,
buckling and peeling away from itself,
shaking with the memory of rhythm.
And I have pressed my ear to your hardwood vibrations,
to hear the steady rough progressions
of chords, of growing older, of where we stand --
I have held fast to your clawed feet.