She has landed on the deck of an abandoned wreck, fails to

remember how she swallowed the fiery ball that pulled her like a

tidal wave into the stillness of a metallic sky steeped in lavender

where angry clouds hover around the drowning sun suffused with

coral. Her pillow is a melted cloud filled with birds that forgot how

to fly and now swim in a pool that overflows the deck, washing the

souls of dead sailors from every leak and corner. She presses on her

eyelids to find a different ending to their story, sees her body glow

with scales and the fish in the pool grow wings. She knows every

drop of water will vanish at dawn, erasing with black ink her

luminous shape alive only in the formless night, and the rainbow will

soon shine over a boat with discarded bags heavy with the stained

memory of unspoken words and broken planks.

I see myself out in the cold, draped in a silk nightgown, seated

barefoot on a stool by that upright piano, you know, the one my

mother bought when she thought I should take piano lessons, while

others played during recess, oh, how I first struggled striking notes

daily, practicing scales, then rehearsing Mozart’s “Rondo alla Turca”

till I’d play it in my mind relentlessly, tan tan tan . . . tan tan tan . . .

even when I knew I’d never learn another piece, and now, half a

century later, I am drawing with memory’s wavering lines that same

piano to make it the vessel of my heart’s message, of so much left

unsaid buried in a bitter well turning into notes that rise in tongues of

cold fire licking my insides with every key I touch, unharmed, I feel

the piano ablaze under my fingertips, twisted candles adorn its top

that grows into a tower and turrets spouting flames from windows,

a menace to the adjacent branches, my fingers wildly strike the

keyboard while the sky opens up like a stage filled with shimmering

damask memories dancing to the melody like maddened fireflies.

It all started when he set out in his suit and tie, searching for a sand

rose in the desert. Wandering through dream’s thresholds, he hoped

to unearth a treasure that would resist the drought of feelings, each

millenary facet telling of the innumerable ways love can be

immortalized. He must have taken a wrong turn since all he found,

erect like a menhir, was a fossil. Was it the hip of a dinosaur, or

rather a Titan’s, lost from times beyond memory, so smoothed by

the scorching sun that it bore no signs? Looking closely he saw an

open jaw with pointed teeth and a hole where an eye once stared. He

feared he had to return empty handed in time for his date, but

realized with terror that he had no recollection of the path

that led him there.