Voices

It’s easy to take another’s voice as your own when you feel your own words aren’t good enough, or when your feet can’t find the world’s rhythm, or when everyone around you speaks in rhymes.

I had this idea once that if I listened Whitman’s voice inside my head, I’d be able to say what I mean; it is so easy for me to slide into his head. Maybe he was doing the same thing when he wrote though, and together, we were just dancing the same old dance everyone else danced, and writing the same old words, with the same worn out meanings, that everyone else had written before.

It’s difficult to find your own voice. Sometimes I take a tape recorder on my walks and tell stories or think of words I’ve read that have stuck in my head. Later, when everyone sleeps and the tape turns, I hear someone else’s voice coming out of that black box. She stumbles over words, repeats sentences until they are incoherent thoughts.

They are only my words when they are in black and white, and when there is no sound except the scratching of a pencil, or the tap of a key.

Frank O’Hara wrote, ‘It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so…’, and I try not to use those words. I try not to think his thoughts. I try not to hear his voice inside my head, although every part of me wants to take him by the hand, lead him onto the floor, rest my cheek against the coarse wool in his sweater, and dance the same old dance.

Breaking Routine

It comes on so slowly, this change in routine. Yet every season I find myself fighting to hang onto habitual tasks. I need another summer morning to pin clothes to the line while still in my nightgown. I need another autumn afternoon to sit on the porch and listen to dry leaves skitter down the road. I need another winter morning with shoes overturned and toasting on the heat vents.

When it's a couple of weeks into spring before I notice they're gone, I know something has happened to me. On Monday morning I go to the back door to put on my shoes, and they aren't there. One morning, I've forgotten exactly which one, I woke up with the sun warming the bed and a foot hanging out from under the covers to cool, and left it bare.

Spring came while I was sleeping, without a fight, without an upset in routine, without a yearning for twenty more minutes under an old warm quilt. Spring came, and I changed with its first dewy breath.

It's the subtlety, the unobserved abrupt change, that inspires me; always controlled, conforming to nonconformity, and now a foot finding its way out of the bedsheets, willing to step on a piece of glass or a rusty nail if it means freedom from restraint, seems to have changed it all.

Spring

Today is the kind of day I like. The yard is mowed. The house is clean. The baby is napping. The windows are open. The plants get to sit in the outside.

It's spring at its finest.

Exercise: Personal Ritual

Long before she bought her first pair of fishnets and rolled down the waistband on her skirts to raise the hemline, there was a nakedness in her eyes like swollen blackberries on a leaf-barren vine.

She looked for it in other people, touching strangers' arms in passing to lure a glance and thumbing the brows over young eyes, soggy with whiskey, until one night there was a wicked dance between the conversationalists in her head that lasted well into morning.

Her ugliness was unique.

She wore it in embarrassment, like stained panties, discreetly, always glimpsing behind to ensure invisibility. She tried to calm the pain by holding in her stomach. Jutted hipbones, concaved stomach, fleshless between her thighs, she fumbled around like a skeleton, a skeleton with bulging ugly eyes.

Gypsy Rondo

In the front room, three feet from the wall, the polyurethane coating has worn off the hardwood floor - not a large spot, just about the size of a child’s heel. A piano once sat there, a black grand with stiff keys and gold etching above the middle ‘C’. Kimball.

Twenty years ago, a girl sat behind the piano every afternoon for two hours; the first hour, required studies; the second hour, free play. Sometimes she would turn the knob on the timer, playing Hannon finger exercises with one hand to cover the click-click-clicking as she inched the dial towards the second hour.

She played Haydn’s Gypsy Rondo until her fingers held the memory, and her mind was able to wander. On quiet afternoons, she reflected upon her morning in the woods - the creek water slowly rinsing the bank, the clouds chasing each other like lovers amputated at the hip - and kept a mindful tempo. On afternoons when contentment filled the house, she listened for the bobbing of the needle on her mother’s sewing machine and kept a steady rhythm.

But most days, she leaned into the piano, back rigid, shoulders hunched, and thumped the keys until her mother’s screaming rampage was deflected from her siblings. Her mother would charge into the large room where the fireplace was never lit because it might leave soot on the furniture, upon which no one was allowed to sit. She would close the drapes that framed the large, welcoming picture windows, which opened up to a world the girl wasn’t allowed to experience.

She would stand next to the piano, salmon-colored cheeks huffing, fingers knotting themselves at her waist, and the girl would say, “I just want to play for you. Sit down. Sit down on the furniture I will never sit upon. Look through the windows at the world I will never experience. Listen.”

And she would watch the girl’s fingers cross and her wrists slightly turn towards the ceiling, while from memory she began a new song. Her mother would back away towards the Victorian style loveseat with rose-colored velour fabric, and stare out the picture window towards the highway which led to places she should never allow her daughter to go.

The girl would press her heel into the hardwood floor, her fingers keeping a slow, steady, comforting tempo while her heart furiously pounded ‘The Dance of the Demon’.

No Title

I imagine the baby I killed had red hair. I can't say for certain since I was nineteen, and that was a long time ago. I only saw him on the monitor at the abortion clinic, and I didn't want to embarrass either of us by staring.

Heath had red hair with ends that were split and curled from being whipped around in the wind. Always once, during every motorcycle ride through the back roads, a lock of hair would catch the corner of my mouth. I'd spit it out and laugh in his ear, and we'd ride.

Five years after I left him, I confessed my sin on a short line next to the question 'Is the your first pregnancy?' Sitting in the doctor's office, watching the receptionist eye The Price is Right while waiting for a copy of my insurance card to slide out of the printer, I felt certain that question was one of those 'true or false' questions; otherwise, the line would have been longer.

For the next six months, people I didn't know rubbed my swollen belly and asked if the baby was my first. I smiled, asked them if they could feel the baby kicking, and lied like the Virgin Mary to save myself.

I imagine the baby I killed had red hair like Heath’s other baby. I saw her at Christmas one year. His mother had put a bow in her long red curls. She jumped off the curb outside the mall, and the wind picked up a lock of her hair, whipping it over her shoulder. I stood at the corner, holding hands with my blond headed son, and watched them ride away.

Pleasure

Pleasure, a thought, then the slow drape of my leg over his belly. In the morning, physical pleasure isn't misused or attached to emotions charged by time, but passes lazily between us.

We work in the garden throughout the afternoon. Side by side, we pull weeds and pinch herbs, speak of bills or the kids. Because of love, because of time, we spend the rest of the day holding the morning under our tongues.

The Heart of the Woods

At Harmonie State Park, everything green stretches its long restless limbs towards the orange morning sun.

I inch down the backside of Sycamore Ridge. Behind me, the leaves rise up delicately, like the fuzz on the arch of a woman's back after a hot shower. I veer through the belly of the woods until moss mounts the trees and dips its roots into the gray bark.

It's barely April, two weeks before the tiny morel skulls will sidle through the leaves, and the thieves have already come to poach her. The chest of the woods has been ripped open, leaves swept aside into great piles, exposing her heart. They come to steal life but they never leave death, only untidiness.

I climb onto a low hanging branch, sit on her shoulder, and drink my coffee while looking into the sun. Later, I will consider whether or not to straighten her up.