Remembering Miss Martin

Select your heroes carefully, she said, and I learned why.
for here my smaller world was left outside;
within this studio was Boulanger,
and bookstalls by the Seine,
and Canterbury where her art
took on the patina of evensong,
so graced in studied nonchalance.
.
She could transport me there, with but a single phrase.
It was as if one could partake of home,
and make of it Elysium wherein perfection lies,
where newfound wisdom listens
to the stillness teaching.

I feared her,
for my fingers would not follow my commands;
her piano could not sing for me—-but most of all
I feared her patience, for she had no need to dramatize
that chasm in between her chair and my disgrace.
In her cold tenderness,
(a shell so thin I dared not shatter it)
I also feared her love.

Now forty years since her last breath, I think of her
inside that studio, an island ship festooned
in fading portraits,
musty scores,
and bound for shores where poplars chant
in whispers that I never heard before.
~