One Perfect Chord
By JD Miller
One perfect chord
Kept drifting in through the walls
Of our brand new apartment,
One piece of what my wife,
With her feet up in my lap
Tells me is a very famous song.
One perfect chord,
And a bunch of other very good ones,
They kept on marching in,
From who knew where,
An invisible piano, an invisible pianist,
Faceless, nameless, genderless
(Though I imagine a woman, her face
Barred by light from the mini blinds,
A practicing bird inside a bright cage,
Of 500 square feet)
It was as if the morning itself,
With its quiet sun falling
Sideways on the still trees,
And the passing bicyclists below,
Had commissioned the piece
As a gift perhaps, or just medicine
For its own soul, being surrounded
At all times by mainly crows.
And I, sitting lazily
With coffee and a book,
Surrounded by unhung pictures
And mirrors, a box of silent records,
Just happened to be at
The exact right place, and time,
Of all the places and times to be,
To hear that perfect chord,
Played solely for me, for only a moment,
Before it went silent,
And to feel the outer crust of my heart
Peel altogether off.