Swan Song, Maria Gelabert

Swan Song

When I was younger and alone in the house, I’d play the piano and keep my foot planted on the damper pedal, listening to the final notes soar and fall like Icarus, and see how long they’d last. See when they’d end.

I’d lean my head against the piano’s lid and listen to the fading notes until just a faint vibration remained humming against my cheek. Only then would I release the pedal. The notes would end and there’d be only my breath left hanging in the air, blood beating through my veins, my body pulsing, and the remnants of an A minor chord drifting towards the skylight.

My mother would sit next to me, though her body hadn’t entered the house in years, and she would fill the space until there was nothing but her curly hair and the smell of decaying roses. She’d sit and everything would die around her-the sunlight, hesitating on the windowpane, the echoes of the piano settling like smoke rings on the ceiling, my violent insistence that I did not miss her.

I saw her when I was six, after she was gone.

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She ran past me towards the horizon, and she looked back, once, but then she turned forward and kept running into the sun. I don’t know if it was rising or setting-if she rose with the sun or dropped with it from the heavens and sank into the earth’s cold embrace to join her bones.

But my mother’s ghost would rise and set with my breaths when there was nothing in the house but fading chords from the piano. Then I’d press another key and listen to it fall.

Maria Gelabert ’15 *Poet Laureate Winner

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