My mother used to sing to horses. She claimed that “Get Me to the Church on Time” from My Fair Lady soothed the skittish buckskin mare. But when she sang in the presence of human beings, they generally begged her to stop. From my mother I absorbed the notion that both she and I were simply born without music, just as we’d been born without wings. It took me over sixty years to discover she was wrong; by then she was ten years dead without a song.
muffled
inside this chrysalis
of doubt—
trembling wings
unloosed by melody
