by Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad
Curdled Chopin
Freshly dehusked from
plaster of paris,
my right hand savours
the wash of sun
after eight constricted weeks.
Gnarled phalanges ache
as healed hairline fractures
feel the pull of
new links knitted within
the matrices of my bones.
My good hand booms a string
of broken chords, a sprinkling
of ebony tones,
waiting in anticipation
as my twig of a right hand
gingerly feels the cold keys
for the first time in months.
A timid staccato, then
Rubato—my fingers tango
to a slow but steady start.
Wasted muscles groan,
smudged notes
rise and fall.
It’s a cacophony
of curdled Chopin
that fills the living room.
Muscle Memory
Years later, when I book
a curbside collection
for the broken oven,
the radiators and fly screens
piled in the garage, I find
the cardboard box with
the sheaf of piano scores
she had wanted me to inherit.
Her three sons had shunned
their mother’s instrument
and even though there were
prodigies aplenty who
made her proud, she chose me
with my unlikely background,
with no musicality
in my family tree,
the student who laboured over
all performance pieces,
to receive her dearest possession.
I can’t bear to look at this
relic from my past when I
can barely play a shred
of this sublime music now.
They might as well be
peppercorns, I scoff—
these semiquavers
spattered in clumps across
the linen-grey sheets.
I grudgingly trace the
impossible highways
of arpeggios, the gullies
of diminuendos
with an ache
metastasizing in my heart.
But I want to believe
I can lift them again the way
she used to, give them effortless
flight, so I take the box
inside, and attempt to
clean the cobwebs off
both paper and mind
as the preludes and fugues
rustle at me from within
her treasured
Well-Tempered Clavier.
And I tease the keys, starting
and stopping, decoding
one bar at a time
like stringing together
a clump of elusive beads and
it isn’t long before
I’m caught in flashbacks
of a self, long withered—
the spotlight crowning my waves,
back arched,
fingers curled—
fifteen,
fearless.
A friend asks for advice on which piano to buy
for his teen who has suddenly retreated
into a shell, and I promptly scan
listings for second-hands and promise
to make phone calls. He hopes that
along with the therapy and medication,
music will restore his child, and
the piano lessons he has enrolled
her in will lead her out
of the fog. I tell him it’s
a great idea.
I revisit a phase from my younger days
when my own mind
was patched together with
regular pumps of Prozac—my mouth
perpetually dry, a tremor
disrupting my brush
as I painted the scarlet blooms
of the flame of the forest near
the railway lines. Those days,
with my instrument stranded in
a different country, I pined
for Saturdays, when a stolen hour at
a pianist friend’s place, to play
the fragments of pieces I still
remembered, was my thin escape
from the voices
thrumming in my head.
It’s evening and he messages again:
Will this help her? Will she be herself
again? I sigh and bite my lip,
texting back that I’ve found
a Baldwin in the neighbourhood,
great sounding, reasonable condition,
free to a good home. Then I add
a heart emoji after
my most reassuring cliches—
Things will get better,
One day at a time.
Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad is an Indian-Australian artist, poet, and pianist who lives and works in Sydney on the land of the Ku-ring-gai people of the Eora Nation. A member of Sydney’s North Shore Poetry Project, Oormila is a chief editor for Authora Australis. Recent poems have been featured in Tistelblomma, Silver Birch Press, and Underwood Press, and Oormila’s recent artwork has appeared in The Amsterdam Quarterly, Back Patio Press, and on the covers of Pithead Chapel, Ang(st) the body zine. Find her @oormilaprahlad and www.instagram.com/oormila_paintings
Photo by unknown photographer