when the women in white cowgirl hats
were too thin, too blond
in those Arizona Highways ads
arriving monthly at my mother’s
porch steps.
I was just a frizzy-dark-haired
Round-faced child who attempted to
iron her hair on a well-used ironing
board and starved to a purposeful death
hours I had poured into borrowed
western hats with wide brims.
Buried them in the red dirt
on the north side
of a pock-marked driveway,
their whiteness stained
with menacing intent.
How should I now measure
the parameters of that porch?
the contours of my face?
honesty of my words?
a mocking western sky?
The hats never fit. I never fit –
my excuse for sending all the birdsong
to an untimely death.
I had refused to learn their names –
the birds—the women in white hats.
Is it only in the naming
that I can make a cactus wren’s song
mine?
Or is that how
I let go?
*The music is not in the notes but in the silence between. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
