is what my mom was.
This is what I told my music class
in a lesson on instruments
when I was very little.
My mother was a PE teacher.
Of course, it was me
who lusted after ethereal & moody vibrations
just like it was me who would never do a single pull-up
or hit it out of the park. Who even
needed tangible ambitions
when you could be anything at all: this
was the lesson of the harp. Larger than the body
playing it, embracing it, ridiculously shaped
like a wobbly portal
or the mouth of a whale. Noise
unlike noise, noise that carried a body
almost away. Oh, really!
my teacher must have said
in the usual way of those who know
how to protect the wide-eyed
from the profane. Yeah, really,
I may have replied, rapt
by my own vision, my mom following
her harp around the world, it’s incredible.
