A limp accordion on a table top
is the people’s music languorously at ease
here in this Vancouver junk shop.
Compact the thing and press those keys
and you can make it wheeze
out some popular pop song from the bloody forties
about what goes on under apple trees
or the skies over Dover when the world is free.

It’s an overcast evening, greying into night,
when we’ll be witnesses again, by satellite,
of those squalid, slaughtered bodies in Beirut.
And what false note,
what breezy little number of thin air
will saccharinate that sacrifice?

Old Billy Yeats, that amorous fool
and patron of girls’ boarding schools
would tell us to stop worrying and play
between the gyres of ripeness and decay,
believing our mere gaiety will suffice.
Meanwhile, the terror accumulates everywhere.
No wonder he gave this beastly thing away,
whatever tin-eared minstrel owned it once.

I’m reading too much into it, of course,
as is my wont. I very much doubt remorse
for the way things are—the impossible divide
between cheap art and a deadly world—has led
to this abandonment of song. Instead,
I have a hunch
some impecunious player needed lunch,
and hunger, unlike art, can conquer pride.

Still, all things are what we make of them—
passions and instruments and massacres—
and, since it does no harm, I can infer
this thing to be a symbolic item.

It says our gaiety can’t transform that dread;
for all our odes and songs, the dead are dead;
and we poor weasels fighting in our hole
delude ourselves with visions of control
by shuffling words around, concocting rhymes,
creating lexical landscapes where such crimes
as murders in Beirut are things we speak of
together with passions and instruments and love.

And that, of course, is what I’m doing now.
This accordion, that Beirut,
are both of them cards of different suits
I happen to have in hand somehow.
But there is no accordion here, and no Beirut,
only an accordance we’ve made, and we might as well stop.
Let the doorbell jangle when you leave this shop,
not here, with no accordion.