Silence, Like a Poultice — Summary

Old Iron Toes is giving the ivories a beating

Big, bad foot. of formidable proportions

Playing Chopin's nocturne in C# minor

Pink kerchief absorbing his perspiration

Tf not the stench of his callused physiognomy He’s like a power hammer in an infant’s nursery Chopping Chopin on the butcher’s block

Then a little girl named Natalia taps Old Iron Toes And suggests he take a breather

And in his welcomed and long-overdue departure Resumes the nocturne with sparkling facility

Here in the lobby of a tenement house

Where the rats and collection agents

Find easy spoil

Necessity never made a good bargain But she makes great banana waffles With fresh strawberries and whipped cream

Her eighth floor apartment is a curiosity shop Snake bite serums and dried seahorses

A library containing a Gutenberg bible

And Kerouac’s letters to Ferlinghetti

And underneath the kitchen counter

Equipment for a pirate radio station

The microphones for which are placed behind a marble table At which a neighbor's two children, Loruhamah and Loammi Build villages on a board game

Stopping only for banana waffles and bathroom breaks

They’ve been at it for months now

Saying nothing, the silence broadcast

And appreciated on both sides of the Atlantic Interrupted now and again

By the hammering of an unfortunate piano In the lobby seven floors below

We return to Necessity, the generous, cross-eyed beauty As she sails across the narrow hallway from her door To the exit at the south end

In a flax, pintuck dress

Her hand brandishing a wasp nest on a torn branch

She steps into an elevator

Joining a rat and a collection agent

Scaring them into silence

And by the time they reach the basement parking lot Into models of self abnegation

They wave shyly with their straw boaters

As she exits in a blaze of thunder