impression #3: ave maria (hail mary)

For Hannah's Contest. Painting by Paul Cezanne.

the sky is that coldest shade of blue – a cloudless washbasin
and the river has broken up into continents and gulfs of ice. the cattails
lean in achingly, lean in rattling, toneless slips of ice; they are pale and unkempt
as sleepwalkers with nowhere to go. the waterpipes in the houses have
frozen – iron, bolted, and elbowed, gurgling like burped babies, split
labyrinth in the basement. we line candles underneath them, the dolled-up
flames tickling the pipeworks, the candles white and staunch and all in a line,
like suffragettes.

and when we open the curtains – purple and sleeved – the stingy, inherited light
spills in – harsh radiation – and turns our skin thin and translucent and I think I can see
each of the bones in your hand – a white, vital crib, picketed and holding my own.
there is ice on the windowpanes, complex engineering, a tapestry and wedding of alien pattern,
woven and still as paralyzed nerves. in the kitchen, mother is canning the vegetables
we froze over the summer and the tomatoes steam and peer, breathing like
old men polishing their spectacles.

you practice piano, each note rising disturbed from the gut of the instrument like
birds from the underbrush. your body weaves, concentrated, your chest flat
and breastless in that dress. you close your eyes, fingers riding on the keys,
the skeletal yellow keys. on the sheet music, the notes proceed on their
restless death march, unformed and unidentified as stem cells. it is christmas
and you play ave maria. disciplined and chaste, you touch the piano keys
as if they were the notches in the spine of
someone lying next to you in the warm, anonymous dark.

maria weeps – the music reaches the kitchen, and mother sets down a jar
and looks outside, where the black, bundled people walk prompt
and white-faced in the cold and where no one ever looks back.