Issue 23: Patrick Cotter
The Piano of El Médano
Each morning after rush hour they emerged
from a doorway on Cal Teobaldo Power:
the men who could never venture out without
a piano over their heads – a baby grand,
so that it took ten of them to walk all over
town without strain; down by the pier,
where you could swear the seagulls
sang sean-nos between gulps of fishheads;
through the marketplace where aging hippies
flogged courgettes, stained glass earrings
and wall masks fashioned from porous,
crumbly solidified magma; past the 3D,
metre high, cut-out, white lettered sign
of the town’s name against which tourists
selfied, with the sea and dormant volcanoes
posing behind them. The piano cover, red
velvet, reached down to the waists
of the men so nobody could see their faces
and the piano legs were six feet long
so they could set it down when they reached
a café and could order coffees or aperitifs
they sipped unseen beneath the red
velvet cover. Thunks and clangs fell
to their feet whenever they were on the move.
Of course, it was never in tune and yet once
I heard the first three notes of McCartney’s
Yesterday peal out perfectly, followed by
the right length pause before more
pure cacophony like the arrhythmic pulses
of metal-hearted beasts.
“If we could all live long enough,
and watch them do this billions of times,
eventually we would hear Love is a Many
Splendoured Bird played perfectly by complete
accident’ said the man I later learned the locals called
‘professor’. I didn’t know whether to be happy or sad.
The Hound Artist
The one who clasped the collar on
is as absent as the virtuous family
in the vintage photographs fastened
to the wall behind; as still and dutiful
as the day they lingered for the slow exposure,
as still as this dutiful hound now, not needing
a leash and yet leashed with a long lash of leather
as slack as superfluous. She has a red-
coated, palace guard’s inscrutability. One
might think a mouse could skitter across
her paws, a kitten claw at her nose and she
wouldn’t flinch. The surrounding room looks
like it would collapse first, the stool with its uneven
legs, the lilting sideboard decades without polish,
the doorway drapes frayed and dustcovered,
the floor unlevel, crying for a screed, and she
too secure and self-assured to even be proud.
Her gaze on me lacks expectation, she appears
as detached as the Buddha, the Buddha in canine
form. I find myself overcome with an unwillingness
to move, not out of fear as before a snarler, a drooler,
a curled-lip fang-revealer, but as before a great artist
who deserves a moment devoid of distraction.
I am in awe of this performance, of an artform
I neither recognise nor understand, perhaps
I am missing the dimension of smell or high decibel
hearing which might explain everything, as I try
to remember how I reached this room, how long ago.
Patrick Cotter is the author of Perplexed Skin and Making Music. His poems have appeared in the Financial Times, Five Dials, London Review of Books, Poetry, Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland Review and elsewhere. He has received the Keats-Shelley Prize. patrickcotter.ie
Copyright © 2019 by Patrick Cotter, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
