Open Shutters by Mary Jo Salter

The Accordionist
    A whining chord of warning—the Métro’s version
    of Concert A—and we clear the sliding doors.
    People take their seats as if assigned.
    Some of them open paperbacks, like playbills,
    with a formal air of expecting interruption.
    Or as if the passengers themselves are actors
    in a scene the stage directions might have called
    Passengers reading,
so that it scarcely matters
    when they turn the page, or even if it’s blank.
    Enter a gypsy boy, who lurches forward
    carrying an accordion, like a stagehand
    awaiting orders where to set it down.
    But when the doors wheeze shut, as if by reflex
    his accordion too collapses, opens, closes
    to the tune of “La Vie en Rose.” He has no shoes.
    Unlike the rest of us, dressed soberly
    in solid colors, he’s a brazen mess
    of hand-me-down, ill-fitting plaids and paisleys.
    He’s barely old enough to be skipping school,
    but no note of fear or shyness, or of shame,
    shadows his face: it was years ago already
    somebody taught him how to do this.
    To entertain, that is—and in the coin
    of the culture: an Edith Piaf song pumped
    for all it’s worth from the heartsore instrument
    the audience links with soundtracks of old films,
    as a loving camera climbs the Eiffel Tower.
    But nobody is looking entertained.
    They seem to be in some other kind of movie,
    more modern, calling for unblinking eyes
    (the actor’s oldest trick for coaxing tears)
    that no longer lead to tears. No words. Just chords
    too grand to be specified. Or is it that?
    Blank faces, maybe, standing in for blank
    faces, much like wearing basic black.
    The boy’s still young enough he plays right through
    the next stop—when he might have passed a cup—
    and now, with a shrug, he segues crudely to
    another chestnut: “Je Ne Regrette Rien.”
    My station’s coming up. I start to rummage
    furtively in my wallet, held as close
    to heart as a hand of cards (of credit cards
    luck dealt me); isolate a franc. And stand,
    nearly tumbling into him, to drop
    the object of my keen deliberation
    into the filthy pocket of his jacket,
    careful not to touch it. In a second
    I stride out from the car to my next scene
    on the platform, where I know to exit right
    and up the stairs, out to the world of light.
    I’ll never see him again.
    But some instinct (as the train accelerates
    and howls into the tunnel on its pleated
    rubber joints, one huge accordion)
    tells me to look back—a backward take
    on Orpheus, perhaps, in which now only
    Eurydice goes free? And fleetingly
    I catch through windows of the next three cars
    the boy repeated. No, these are his brothers—
    each with an accordion in hand
    and each boy inches taller than the last—
    who handed down to him these blurring clothes,
    and yet because the train unreels as fast
    as a movie, a single window to a frame,
    my eye’s confused, has fused them as one boy
    growing unnaturally, an understudy
    condemned to play forever underground.

Advent
    Wind whistling, as it does
    in winter, and I think
    nothing of it until
    it snaps a shutter off
    her bedroom window, spins
    it over the roof and down
    to crash on the deck in back,
    like something out of Oz.
    We look up, stunned—then glad
    to be safe and have a story,
    characters in a fable
    we only half-believe.
    Look, in my surprise
    I somehow split a wall,
    the last one in the house
    we’re making of gingerbread.
    We’ll have to improvise:
    prop the two halves forward
    like an open double door
    and with a tube of icing
    cement them to the floor.
    Five days until Christmas,
    and the house cannot be closed.
    When she peers into the cold
    interior we’ve exposed,
    she half-expects to find
    three magi in the manger,
    a mother and her child.
    She half-expects to read
    on tablets of gingerbread
    a line or two of Scripture,
    as she has every morning
    inside a dated shutter
    on her Advent calendar.
    She takes it from the mantel
    and coaxes one fingertip
    under the perforation,
    as if her future hinges
    on not