The pianist (Poem about my father)

One day he gave on a concert on an island (Antille.)
He saw a Dutch newspaper with a picture of his country,
and words he couldn’t read that looked like death.
Someone translated for him—a fat orange skinned
man waving a cigar like a wand—indeed the headers
were what they looked like.
He stayed with a woman he met at the concert
in an Art Deco house between the airport and the bay.
He bought a puppy
that grew within nights
into a German Shepherd dog resembling the police-hounds.
If you put a conch shell to your ear you hear the ocean.
First wireless telephone, invented by Neptune.

In a hotel lobby, a player piano without a pianist tinkles
as tourists ask for more coke in their gin
or a third sunlit cherry topping the whipped cream cloud
atop a Piña Colada.

Forte or pianissimo, either which way
he stopped playing the piano.
The roof over the balcony of the Art Deco house
resembled the wing of a Baby Grand.
The dun keys' ivory came from tusk after tusk
of boars, warthogs, olifants,
mastodons and mammoths who tired
of the new, strange sun.
Practice by now was superfluous.
Rainflies gathered round his whiskey cup
and fell asleep forever
upon table's Formica whiter than ivory
which turns beige as Argentine skin.
He never left that house.

His son brings home a girlfriend from the woodlands
to burn Palo Santo and blow smoke and creole
into the rounded corners, concaves
of a vast undersea piano we once inhabited,
from which the long tonal chords have been gutted
as if by Hara Kiri, removed
to be put to a wholly other usage,
more practical by far than music
is the lariat--silencer of echoes and other nuisances.