​Gustave Caillebotte’s Brother Plays the Piano, by Daniel Weiss

Young Man at His Window, by Gustave Caillebotte (France) 1876

​Gustave Caillebotte’s Brother Plays the Piano

An air of ballet wets the keys
and flutters the memories of etudes
into a collection of Martial’s own puddling corpus.
How the light tags the ivory as it
depresses

into the wood and releases violent and honeyed hums. 
He ponders Rene, dead eleven years now, his, and Gustave’s
oils studying this room. Not a fortune
could have kept Rene there, leaning on the
piano in the study, asking himself

where francs go when they die and
looming over the streets of Paris, his body
blocking the sun briefly, the room taut and
dim. The two think: how life could breathe when
Gustave’s friends posed

a threat to the draped daffodils in the couch
and swells of red velvet chairs, gilt.
How that Monet monsieur left the window
curtains an abrasion in the dust of their laze
arts, flattering the cool Parisian air. O, but how sweet,

a garden with the boys. 
The burgeoning masculinities of a new Paris, erect
as Gustave’s habitually militant stance since
the itching sobriety of warfare straightened
his spine with fellow soldiers and loosened each stroke

of his brush. How those rivers moved in his
work, Martial recollects as his fingers press 
into the third movement—did old Gustave cage
the Impressionist touch in those small dusks, each
ripple stripping the scene of its definitude,

pacing the wake of the oars as his fellows
and he raced down the suburban Seine? Is this
the new Paris to those thirteen years on
with the kind of money that traces your footsteps
into the grave? Will he paint this? Will

Rene and Mother hide in the rising
steam from Gustave’s and Claude’s Gare Saint Lazare?
Their faces pressed against the glass of a new train?
And what of Gustave’s burgeoning collection of poor Claude’s
work? Where will it be written? Which will? Piano wood,
whisper something true and strip
the floorboards for Gustave. Paint into the husky breaths
of the dead.
 
Daniel Weiss

Daniel Weiss is a writer, ceramicist, and archaeologist from River Forest, IL. He earned his B.A. in anthropology from Kenyon College in 2024, where he was an Associate at The Kenyon Review and co-founder of the student-run magazine FOCUS. As a field archaeologist, he cherishes the opportunity to meet the past in person, finding that archaeology's inherent relationship to nature and the passage of time heavily influences his work. His poetry appears in Shadowplay and Wayfarer Magazine.

Young Man Playing the Piano, by Gustave Caillebotte (France) 1876

The Canoes, by Gustave Caillebotte (France) 1878