Soft tracings of shadows on the sill,
late afternoon in the unconservatory.
The chocolate stillness inside
the voice rises up in place of speech,
small nuances, a brass color-note,
flared nostrils, the contact of skin.

Four-handed improvisational foreplay on the keyboards.

Two pianos discuss familiar phrases,
like the long-married, finish each other's thoughts,
sometimes in chorus, sometimes in tandem.
You're the yell in the forest, I'm the echo,
Kirk says to Marilyn as they play it again.

Imagine Casablanca, or Havana in a red wedding dress.
The mysterious marriage of two styles: classical & jazz
shape-shift into music for the end of the millennium.
He is a sailor leaning into the open octaves
of a turquoise melody: bluebirds learn slant rhyme.
She is the swimmer in pastoral snow fields.

Everything reduced to black and white
cleanses the palate & the roses bleed onto the piano keys.
The melody escapes, anneals the heart’s blood with opposites:
day & night, diamond & onyx, ebony & ivory.
Each seeks the other’s eyes through corbelled piano lids.
I can’t tell where one piano leaves off and the other begins.

Poco a poco, an echo in the forest
lifts the timbre from the pool's depths.
At the bottom of the well, cross-currents,
a vibration in the water, like electricity
when the wall comes up duet—
Both are one; one is all there is.

Download a musical excerpt from For the Two of Us (mp3 format).