Remembering Miss Martin

Select your heroes carefully, she said. Within her studio was Boulanger, bookstalls by the Seine, and Canterbury where her art took on the patina of evensong. I made of her the heroine apart, feared her brittle tenderness, and though she must have known, I also feared her love. The fear was in my fingers, too; her piano could not sing for me. I even feared her patience, for she had no need to dramatize that chasm in between her chair and my disgrace. Now forty years since her last breath, She still transports me there, and makes of it Elysium wherein perfection lies, where newfound wisdom listens to the stillness teaching. I see inside that studio, a charter ship festooned in fading portraits, musty scores, and bound for shores where poplars chant in whispers that I never heard before. ~