Page 50 - WTP VOl.XII #2

charity eVerett
Remembering My 5th-Grade Teacher While Listening to Handel’s “Water Music”
Formidable, though at the time I didn’t know
the word, only her solidity like mortared stone, an old mill sheathed in moss while water sparked in grace notes off its turning wheel.
Fifteen minutes each Friday her regal eye pinned us
to our desks with empty paper and chalk to draw and color the sounds that fell into the hopper of our ears. Poured and sliding one way then another, bumbling through
the wheelworks of ten-year-old lives, they trickle out
in my sluggish scrawls, a meandering stammer like our creek beyond the barn before the summer rains, thick with green scum and flies. Thin melodies string their web through the dumb rocks of my listening. Impatient fingers drum, eager for some accidental harmony to budge them from inertia, to leap
into the flash dance of trumpets tumbling over themselves, somersault on sun-bleached grass as they chase
flighty violins in prismatic circles until from the echoes
of their collapse I scribe joyful great plumes of white
into the sulfurous heat and rend the gray clatter of water
on a tin roof with slashing electric yellow and a spark of red.
Now, all colors have voice, the blue spaces of loss,
cinnamon pleasure of old friends. I unravel the polyphony
of years, wishing sometimes to change tempo or dynamics, modulate hue and tone, discard entire themes. Mine is still
an amateur composition but I have learned how to mill
one thing into another, finger the limits of harmony, love
the kaleidoscopic sparks spun from the livid edges of dissonance.
Everitt is retired following a career in technical writing and engineering soft- ware design and development. Her poems have appeared in Lyrical Iowa, River Heron Review, Comstock Review, Concho River Review, and Her Words/Black Mountain Press, among others. Her first chapbook, Translation from the Ordinary, was published in 2023 (Finishing Line Press).
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