Found this in an old New Yorker discard years back. It's clipped and pasted in an old journal...somewhere.
Horse Piano
Anna MacDonald
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 or 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.
