"Horse Piano" by Anna McDonald

                               HORSE PIANO

The idea is to get a horse, a Central Park workhorse.

A horse who lives in a city, over in the hell part of Hell’s
   Kitchen, in a big metal tent.

You have to get one who is dying.


Maybe you get his last day on the job, his owner, his
   tourists.

You get his walk back home at the end of the day,

some flies, some drool. You get his deathbed, maybe.


And then, post mortem, still warm, you get the vet or else
   the butcher

to take his three best legs. And then you get the taxidermist
   to stuff them

heavy, with some alloy, steel, something.


Next day you go over to Christie’s interiors sale and buy a
   baby-grand piano,

shabby condition but tony provenance, let’s say it graced the
   entry hall

of some or other Vanderbilt’s Gold Coast classic six.


And you ask the welder you know to carefully replace the
   piano legs

with the horse legs, and you put the horse/piano somewhere
   like a lobby,

and you hire a guy to play it on the hour, so that everybody
   will know

how much work it is to hold anything up in this world.


Source of the text - The New Yorker, December 19 & 26, 2011, pp. 116-7.

Bourguignomicon: With deceptive ease, the poet animates the beauty & monstrosity of joining two beautiful things as a metaphor for poetry (or life) itself.