still shaking from my dream:
I was coming home
through a howling dust storm,
my lowered face was scrubbed raw by dirt and wind.
Grit scratched my eyes,
it crunched between my teeth.
Sand chafed inside my clothes,
against my skin.
Dust crept inside my ears, up my nose,
down my throat.
I shuddered, nasty with dust.
In the house,
dust blew through the cracks in the walls,
it covered the floorboards and
heaped against the doors.
It floated in the air, everywhere.
I didn’t care about anyone, anything, only the piano. I
searched for it,
found it under a mound of dust.
I was angry at Ma for letting in the dust.
I cleaned off the keys
but when I played,
a tortured sound came from the piano,
I hit the keys with my fist, and the piano broke into
a hundred pieces.
Daddy called to me. He asked me to bring water,
Ma was thirsty.
I brought up a pail of fire and Ma drank it. She had
given birth to a baby of flames. The baby
burned at her side.
I ran away. To the Eatons’ farm.
The house had been tractored out,
tipped off its foundation.
No one could live there.
Everywhere I looked were dunes of rippled dust.
The wind roared like fire.
The door to the house hung open and there was
dust inside
several feet deep.
And there was a piano.
The bench was gone, right through the floor.
The piano leaned toward me.
I stood and played.
The relief I felt to hear the sound of music after the
sound
of the piano at home.…
I dragged the Eatons’ piano through the dust
to our house,
but when I got it there I couldn’t play. I had swollen
lumps for hands,
they dripped a sickly pus,
they swung stupidly from my wrists,
they stung with pain.
When I woke up, the part
about my hands
was real.
July 1934