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This week, we're featuring poems related to music. Songs that move and change us. Songs that heal us. What can we discover about ourselves, when we listen to music? A lot, it seems.

The Piano Speaks
by Sandra Beasley

                       After Erik Satie

For an hour I forgot my fat self,
my neurotic innards, my addiction to alignment.

For an hour I forgot my fear of rain.

For an hour I was a salamander
shimmying through the kelp in search of shore,
and under his fingers the notes slid loose
from my belly in a long jellyrope of eggs
that took root in the mud. And what

would hatch, I did not know—
a lie. A waltz. An apostle of glass.

For an hour I stood on two legs
and ran. For an hour I panted and galloped.

For an hour I was a maple tree,
and under the summer of his fingers
the notes seeded and winged away

in the clutch of small, elegant helicopters.

"The Piano Speaks," by Sandra Beasley, from I WAS THE JUKEBOX by Sandra Beasley, copyright © 2009 Sandra Beasley. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company.