All my life before him, every word I wrote
had heard the notes turning into air above the pages
and spinning my desire into jail and joy
or memory of someone not quite gone.
Like children in the womb or eggs asleep
in a girl’s all possible, the words I gave to paper
heard whatever I heard and bore the residue
of Janácek and Liszt, Grieg and Shostakovich.

But when I met the man I’d marry, he gave me
names for what I ‘d always loved without a word,
and played his bass beneath, beside and over me,
so I began to listen differently, the symphonies
that once had slipped so easily beneath the page,
suddenly a competition, and every day I turned
the volume down a little more until there was
this silence, these white pages that I offer you,
written without music. Except for the cry

of my child.

A tree is not a human thing, with its feet
In the ground and its back hard against the sky;
It cannot tolerate the small human tendernesses

Moving beneath…

She could see that Shirley Jackson understood.
As one of the guardians, she inspired and oppressed
At the same moment. She became, that summer, another kind

Of hot wind pushing the days forward.