for L.T.

I couldn’t guess how many students went before me
into that narrow place that once had been a closet.
The room had space for the piano, for a pair 
of armchairs, and for shelves of music 
looming out of reach. She would perch 
at one end, trim and spare,
white-haired and immaculate, 
sharp as a razor, very near as thin. 

Her hands across the keys (guiding me 
in phrasing I could never help but rush)
Were long and sculpted, papery with age.
She counted out in brisk staccato, tapped against my thigh,
and the beats were light, so light, their only weight
came with her voice that snapped like winter twigs. 

I could have broken her in half, even then, 
still just a child, soft in all the wrong places, 
my fingers not yet nimble, not yet long.
But when she played Rachmaninoff, or Lizst, 

Then you could see.
Her hands were iron; she,
like the instrument itself, could not be moved;
she was a shell
With wires in its heart.

At first, of course, it was awful being a tree;
nobody ever taught me how to sway gently 
or how to live without always reaching my hands 
to touch and take, to handle and hold. 

That first autumn when my leaves left me
all I could think was: this is nakedness (I could still feel shame
then, when my soft body with its hungers was not yet far behind).
I was still afraid of being cold. 

But winter, that first winter, taught me sleep
and sway, taught me to slow what was now my blood,
taught me to wait for warmth, and taught me, too,
how to bend my limbs to shelter smaller things.

I have outlived those things, and outlived, too
the witch that cursed me, and the world I knew.
But birds still come to me for warmth, and I 
have long since learned the way to be a tree.

My father said the dog had wolf blood in him; 
dogs like that — rangy, rowdy dogs just a little too dumb
to be trusted inside, dogs nobody bothers to teach —
are always said to have wolf blood in them.

He was nobody’s pet except his own:
lived outside, did not take walks, ate like a horse,
and his sole pleasure was escape.

From time to time he would slip out and run like thunder
five or six miles from home and kill chickens. 
Cursing, scowling, my dad would go to fetch him,
bring him back daubed in blood and grinning wildly,
A mad king in the back bed of a shitty pickup.

He’d lay in the summer shade panting:
dumb as a bag of hammers, soft as cotton, 
just canny enough to be aware
of all the ways a wire fence can bend.

He spilled carbolic acid in the hall once; the stink was terrible,
and no apology, either. All summer he’s been
up and down the stairs, feverish, a dozen times a day.
And yes this is, of course, what one gets
with tenants in a town like this, but still. 

It’s not even that I mind the smell or the racket
or him coming in and out at every hour of night with fingers or jars of organs or bundles of long bones wrapped in oilcloth,
but Christ almighty, he’s a crushing bore.
He doesn’t shake hands, which is the custom here,
and he talks too much on the subject of himself.

Next time I’ll rent out to a musician, someone
who at least will have a good story to excuse his sins.

The moment she sees me she goes 
Still in every ink-dipped limb, not even her nose
twitches, not even an ear swivels, 
the amber liquid of her eyes glassy
as a pond in winter. I have been moving
my big, loud body carelessly through the stubbled
field and she is caught now, watching. She is not sure
if I am a predator like her, or merely something
large and stupid passing through the world.
Any moment now one of us will crack like ice thawing,
one of us will dart away,
one of us will slip soundless through the fabric of the autumn
and one of us will be here standing still. 

He put the flashlight in my hand, said
I should follow him into the night, he draped his own sweater
over my pajamas, helped me pull on my sneakers.

My glasses were smudged, my feet were stupid with sleep,
but I followed him (always, anywhere) 
out to the yard. Swept the beam like he showed me,
while he bent and straightened, bent and straightened, bucket in hand.

I saw how the soil had unburied itself for the night, 
how the ground lived, how the dark parted just enough
to let his hands dip in.

I watched her once or twice when I was tiny,
How her gnarled hands worked their own image into the dough
Over, and over, and over, how her voice 
Skipped over the tempo of her kneading, disregarded it, set it aside,
How her hands were at their own work that was nothing to do with her. 

I can’t do that. Haven’t practiced enough yet, maybe, or maybe
Hers wasn’t the blood that passed down a restless brain, a brain that ticks
And ticks and ticks and looks for things to pick up, turn over like a magpie
Scavenging. Regardless 
when I’m kneading I am always thinking about it, the bread, the dough, the rhythm
of my hands that aren’t like hers. Not yet.

In the old days, I tell him, we had to wait until people were home,
You couldn’t just expect they would be there when you called. 
You could maybe try the office, if they had one,
But it was a different world before you were in it, I say. 

He closes his eyes and tries, tries, I can see it,
Tries to trace the shape of a world so disconnected 
You could reach through the air and not find someone listening every time. 

And I picture that world, the empty rooms of the past, 
I reach back, call up the memory he’s trying to imagine.
I find it there, still echoing with no answer.  How it felt 
To need someone who wasn’t picking up.