The Symphony
The Symphony When I first split into womanhood (forty – forty – forty years ago!) the world split in two like an apple. Men were frightening, women more so, and some days I hardly knew which half to bite down on. It was hot then and maybe the sky was a woman, the river a man. You couldn’t learn these things in school. It was hot and hard to think. Alligators, snakes, mosquitoes bit. The air was fat with flowers, the slow, slow accents of heat-colored birds. I didn’t know if I moved my legs and arms or something moved them for me. Everything was alive. That much I knew. And I was alive too, but alone. Is that why I moved north where gray sky, frozen lake make everything feel dead and people crowd together in heated rooms to say real things to each other as if they had a life in common? I like it here, like getting older here. Some gray hairs grew the old-fashioned way but some grew out of joy. I used to think this place could save a soul cleaved. Lately, though, as I fall out of womanhood, I don’t think much at all in halves or opposites. If there is a time and a place for everything, maybe it’s here now, when everything swims through as if here and now were porous and everything is singing Just You Wait. Sherry Robbins, from Or, the Whale, BlazeVOX [books]
Sherry Robbins 