Practice Room
       

Inside this padded door the only sounds
are ours—a little cough, the drag of soles
across some dingy shag, how fingertips
awake to warm the keys with minor chords
that drain the gray from clouds. Our weather pours
into this closet air and dies against the walls.
There is no teacher here or metronome
to clack us back in time. What shadows pass
pass dimly in the hall, in muffled light,
omissible as mimes who flee the crowd's
fatigued applause. Whose charts now shall we play?
The tortured brilliances some centuries
have made lie in a heap. Our songs or theirs,
the world won't hear us talking to our hands.

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Copyright © 2021 Adam Tavel All rights reserved
from Copper Nickel
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission