The Accordian

On your shoulder, an immobilized child.
Its abbreviated keys, the half-smile one offers for photographs.
Its sound is the whispering of the rosary, the head of a cabbage split in
two.

It prophesizes that you’re bound to fall through the cellar steps
one day, that at any moment the ambulance outside might combust.

With the denuded voice of alcohol and cigarettes, it tells the same
orphaned story of not knowing on what boat, in whose hands
it arrived.

It recalls in its swells of nostalgia, picking your grandfather up from the
snow,
drunk, his too-big pants at his knees.
The aunt who eventually hoped to see with her prosthetic eye.
It says it is the everyday that haunts:

the catatonic orchestration of the clothesline leading the wind,
the cat crossing the yard as though the afternoons
were nothing but straight down.

A relic.
A symbol for what doesn’t work anymore; this emergency lung
stowed in its bomb-proof case at the bottom of the closet,
its smell now that of cattle, or brine.

Who even knows how to play it? Did it just wash up here?
It’s emphysemic wheeze like a plane going down.
It makes us believe that one should be grateful just for their skin,
that it contains us.

It dreams of a Sunday someone will finger its dirty teeth with a polka.
Here on my lap, its breath drawn, it longs to sing of the children
found blue in their cribs, this lightless northern light.
It says it will outlive all of us, and that nowhere
despite our toasts heavenward, does the afterlife exist.

Bill Rasmovicz