Rejection's Just Another Name for Nothing Left to Lose

I received a rejection email from The New Yorker the other day for three poems. While it's always hard to get a rejection, you should know that the vast majority of published writers could paper their entire houses with rejection letters. It's a part of the life cycle, and if you're afraid of rejection, afraid of criticism of your work, you have two options: Quit writing or nut up.

On to the next submission!

This is one of the three poems I sent. I am interested in any feedback. Gaman is the Japanese term for "enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity." A more complete definition can be found here. I am debating whether or not to explain the definition in a small bit of text at the beginning or end of the poem, and that I wrote this poem shortly after the tsunami in Japan. Your thoughts?

Gaman

A piano lies

parsed in the middle of the road.

The foot traffic is rats and ghosts.

Keys hold fast to melody

in their determination to line up

and stick together.

Middle C

apostrophied

by C sharp

and married to D,

closely watched by D's dark half-step.

As if the earth had not been shifted

and then drowned,

as if silence was more destructive

than muddy water,

as if sound could knit together

fragments of pavement

and glass

and sundered skin.

But of this fractured instrument

splashed across two lanes of traffic

in a town where no cars move

of their own ignition,

order is illusory:

the music you hear

is just the wind and the rain

moving debris

across the guts of a piano.