There are music schools now in every strip mall;
and rows of silent windows in the old convent
from which piano scales used to pour at dusk.
Luisa A. Igloria, “Your Cinema Paradiso“
how long ago was it when i ran young, chubby fingers
across the keyboard and sought out “Blue Moon,”
asked if an older cousin and i could do four hands
on grandmother’s upright trucked to Baguio in the late fifties?
relearning to play the piano in my twenties,
i wanted “Moon River” or Satie’s “Gymnopaedie”
to fill afternoons of practice but the teacher insisted on scales
until quills i grew on my skin at the thought of scales,
and the piano and i abandoned one another.
today you can find me in concert halls,
there we can moon all we want,
embrace with the force of a lover’s longing
what was lost and eventually found.