For Mary Rose

During the Trouble Years my love sang the same song every day but every day she’d change—slightly—the words One day she sang a song for sweepers and the next day the sweepers became hangmen On Friday the hangmen turned into willows In September the willows turned back to broomsticks broken in the hands of janitors She and I used to play a game waiting for the ferry or on long walks to my auntie’s house One of us would begin a song and the other would repeat the line changing just one word— back and forth like that— drawing and redrawing the images in the lyrics each time growing an extra eye or tongue or losing a foot one word at a time The game gave us nuns (whom we loved) on skateboards and who ate steamed buns in Muncie where they confessed to the Best Western desk they were once boys who were once orchids who were snakes first slithering through midtown palaces blazing on trains turned rocketships in Oxnard and tractors in Parlin before straddling massive salamanders in Paris where the sisters farted on the heads of billionaires and shook tambourines in their yellow teeth before they got down on their knees and prayed And the cold mist of the ferry was always good And the cold air between our house and my auntie’s just as good

My darling loved most to sing in dark places especially dank bars packed with locals who were swift to rise from their crummy chairs and stagger to their feet setting their drinks on the closest table or they’d simply fling their glasses to the floor to finally hold one another so close they could sniff each other’s cheeks though hardly anyone knew another’s name My love put their tables in her song and the backroom’s musty wood and the dusty lavender smell of factories beside the perfume of goat breath like a gift inside the song and sometimes the crowd would swell into laughter all together to see if such a singer and such a song could hold the joyful sound of a hundred strangers and they would stomp and twirl to see if their dance could keep up with my love’s song and with all their singing and swinging stepping and sliding they forgot their walking legs and their meat hooks and the thick pine smell that haunted their saws my lover’s song so fearless sometimes the dead got up too for even the most crotchety of our elders knew if we opened ourselves up wide enough to the song the song would not leave us even lying down and this is how her singing became a country that could go everywhere a vagabond that moved through whoever welcomed it This is how a song became a little nation inside a hundred people grooving so hard no one could say exactly what a nation was—the land the people upon it or the ones buried in its fields and hills for the dancers were pure tremor cycle and vibration Migrants they were pure wave

Sometimes short on rent my love would sing for quick money in big beautiful halls crystalline and sad where the people were also sad for their ties were always straight and their clothes were well pressed and they dared not scuff the good gleam of their belt buckles—that kind of sad— they were so rich with the wealth of silks and platinum garland and fast boats The marble floors of their salons so clean you couldn’t tell a single blade was put to wood or that a drop of blood had fallen on their shiny tiles No evidence of the making but by god when my love sang every one of these bright-buttoned folks would sway barely budging at first so you couldn’t notice the ghosts stirring inside them like a sugar starting to cook into its first kick of liquor swirling now nudging them like a sweet inner fog They tried (Oh did they try) not to let the rhythm in They gripped the tables’ silver in their fingers and curled their toes inside their shoes And just as the music got into their stiff hips their bodies relented It was then my love would begin to fit new words to this familiar tune And clever she would hide me inside the song(!) maybe just the crook of my neck or the pink scar across my forehead (which she’d touch to calm me when I was sick) Sometimes she’d smuggle into the song my busted up pinky my bruised feet or my father’s piano And I would laugh even louder when the coiffed ones laughed so hard and loose they seemed to be breaking all their great grandfathers’ rules for even the powerful understood the power of what’s hidden how a woman’s voice of wild harps and charging horses was guiding this monster of a song inside them while all us savages and outcasts rode stowaway tucked into the tune with all our fists and all our feet and all our sweat and grime soiling their powdered armpits and fancy panties in public

And when my love finished they would suddenly close up like a patient quickly suturing himself shut At the end of the night their long candles burned to their bit wicks a few of them would approach my love and shake her hand as if she had only one arm They’d thank her as if she had no eyes to kiss and she would tell me going home she knew the song would not stay inside them the way it seemed to abide in us that spirit which makes the hammer and hoe blade ring and the hospital’s faucet water so cool to the lips you might lick the spigot and the engine of the trolley rattle hot this very old spark of the body working and working and working it all on out

And there were mornings—though awake— my love would lie in bed like empty luggage For many nights she moaned in her sleep as if the song were leaving her for good too But then in a week or month often after the winter cold lost its sting to the first gingko buds we’d lift our heads at the same time and hear a small breaking the cracking of a crate smashed glass and crystal which gave way to flutes and cuckoos the heavy steps of old ghosts to keep the new ghosts company This widening country of wandering bodies all the sound through which she roamed and every sound which roamed within us she made and unmade and remade again in the Trouble Time everything she sang and unsang out of fevers and blood where no one was ever lonely She never wanted others to be lonely She sang so no one would ever be lonely I’m speaking in the past as if we will never exist again and yet every song changes as it goes We’ve already begun to turn into tomorrow We are the soonest sounds to come