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 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.

— Anna McDonald