Right at This Moment Someplace on Earth
A woman is almost turning herself inside out so eager to fold a newborn to her chest
A gardener picks a tomato smelling its blood
A baby tastes chocolate for the first time and bursts into tears
Seals are chasing penguins that dangle necklaces of bubbles
A six-year-old tongues a tooth suddenly unanchored
A girl is wrapped in her first slow dance smiling into eyes jittery as magnets
Two students cutting Organic Chemistry lie in bed licking the brie and dulse of their bodies
A red frog entrusts her eggs to a leaf high up in the rainforest
A snowstorm patiently shapes a pickup truck into a wave
A gray whale lofts itself out of the water its flukes trailing a curtain of beads
A woman bites a chunk of warm baguette troweled with butter from cows ruminating on Normandy pastures
Beef marinated in garlic and ginger hits the hot wok as generations gather
A man shoots his wife’s lover but not before a flash of understanding her attraction to him
Lying in bed a prisoner watches a fly escape the cell
A woman is making a poorly attended speech that will inspire the next big change still a century away
The prism of a glacier shrinks
In forest ashes fireweed bursts into magenta
An old man alone in a shack suddenly clutches his chest and slices toward the floor
The evening sun seeps into the ocean
The rising sun sculpts itself from the sea
And the sky is jammed with stars
Watched by riders on horseback traveling through the ghosts of mountains
4,000 Pianos
based on research by Miranda Rogow Sachs
When the Nazis cattled away the Paris Jews,
using the butts of their Mausers to pack
the starred men, women, and children
into boxcars darker than sleep,
those families had to leave behind
their armoires, carved chess sets,
glazed casserole dishes,
and their pianos,
the instrument a daughter had used
to practice every evening
one of Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words.
The soldiers swaddled the pianos,
angling them down snail-shell stairways.
They numbered each one,
and constructed piles of them
in the Palais de Chaillot,
two giant art deco arms
in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower,
where only an occasional rodent
plinked their keys.
A few of the best they nestled
in the villas of Nazi officers—
a Bösendorfer, or the hidden
harp of a Steinway. Partygoers
thumped on them
during soirées of frantic champagne
run up from the cellar with arms full.
Or maybe an officer tried late at night
to recover a piece he could once play by ear—
a Mendelssohn melody interrupted
only by a few staccato blasts
in the distance.
Zack Rogow is the author, editor, or translator of twenty books or plays. His seventh book of poems, My Mother and the Ceiling Dancers, was published by Kattywompus Press. He is the editor of an anthology of poetry of the U.S.A., The Face of Poetry, from University of California Press. Currently he teaches in the low-residency MFA in writing program at the University of Alaska Anchorage and serves as poetry editor of Catamaran Literary Reader.