My Grandmother’s Piano

Rarely played since she lost her hearing.
A wintered bear slipping into a pelt of dust.
Still, what music it emits is sweet:

the creaking galleon of its glossy bench,
the C-sharp of its fallboard’s spruce.
A child sitting there tastes a penny on their tongue.

The 90-year-old child who finds a lone, low E,
and with its one working headlight
Night pulls onto the drive.

Guitar-Shaped Field 

                                            “Stretching for 2/3 of a mile, the multi-colored
                                            instrument was created by one Argentine farmer
                                            to memorialize his wife.” — Atlas Obscura

People will say grief is digging the furrows,
the way the body, bending, thumbs seeds into earth.
Or it’s the plotting of the field itself:
wheat for the neck, acres of oats for the body,
long bursts of ironweed for the strings.
They’ll say the hand strums a guitar
like wind rolling across the crops,
that sorrow is pianissimo erupted by forte,
and silence a minor Stygian chord.
But I think grief is how there was nothing
and then there was a field a man could walk into,
get lost in, stumble out of, and get lost in again.
I see him showing his children how to pluck cornsilk
from the soil, how a beetle dribbles down a knuckle
like a drop of rain. I see winter widening the margins.
A chair in a snow-covered landscape
where a man can sit and listen to his wife play.

Things I Still Remember from Playing Clarinet in High School

For a symphony to tune a perfect chord perfectly
the third needs to be flat, the fifth sharp.
A perfect chord is perfect because it's not.
My favorite knowledge is the kind I can use
to flatter myself. I can still play the clarinet
with a chipped reed; with chipped teeth I kiss
my toddler’s knee, I sing repointing my walkway’s bricks,
I bellow in tune to the chainsaw’s dirge
as it chews across our dying spruce trees.
In both life and sheet music there are doors
with specific keys: the one that once opened
onto your mother's apartment and it’s time
to divide her things, the C major of Peace
Piece—but also, like life, a song’s key is almost
always the final note it plays: the bari sax
of a father’s last breath, the patter of mallets
on a marimba, soft as floaters across a whitening gaze.
The way rubato is parenting, what you give back
is what you used to take; how allegro is both walking
and the rhythm tucked into every dance song’s bass.
Our deepest breaths are taken lying down, that’s how
I breathe when you are on top of me. And that minor third’s
sorrow comes. And then the fourth, its release.





Todd Dillard’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including The Threepenny Review, Southern Review, Waxwing, Pleiades, and The Adroit Journal. His collection Ways We Vanish was a finalist for the 2021 Balcones Poetry Award, and his chapbook Ragnarök at the Father-Daughter Dance is available from Variant Literature. A finalist for the 2025 Donald Hall AWP Poetry Prize, Todd Dillard lives in Philadelphia, PA, and works as a writer for a hospital.

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