FORESTS, TREES AND PURPLE COWS:
AN EMILY DICKINSON CONVERSION OF THE MIND
by Wendy Barker
Page 9
MATTER OF SINGING
Why--do they shut me out of Heaven?
Did I sing--too loud?
- Emily DickinsonHer voice was ever soft, gentle, and low,
an excellent thing in woman.
- King Lear1.
October, grasses beyond the house
so heavy in their seeding
a voice rises from far
under my breasts. Voices that
congregate, push their heat through
the open door of my throat.I listen to Verdi, Donizetti.
The notes follow one another, eager,
lush, clusters opening like umbrels of
small flowers, asters, flames that build
into a bonfire, like running
steps through a fieldafter a light rain, the way
the man I married and I have
followed each other beyond
what we could see, into
the great trees of the old
woods, shadowy variation ofshape, sounds in the wind.
The grasses are more alive now
than any other time of year, massed
fronds, clusters of angel
hair, restless seed, wings
calling, constant rustle.2.
I read in the papers that a woman named
Elojia Macias has been arrested because
she sang again at mass, the voice
she says of an angle who sings to her,
who tells her she must offer her voice,
sing out in the voice of an angel.I remember in the fourth grade the school bus
patrol told me to hush, no singing
allowed on the way to school. October
nights cooling, pyrancantha berries
reddening, clean morning
air. I had been happy. After thatI would sing only the family car.
But then years later, just before
we married, in the sudden summer rain,
he had to put the top us on his Healey,
for the time heard
the sound of my singing. Said to stop.He taught people how not to sing
like that, did it for a living,
didn't want to be reminded of
the way most women sound when they sing,
too much breath. The smoldering
inside a throat, of notes wanting.3.
The voice that woke me
in Berkeley, the sixties,
my twenties. Someone playing
a flute in the night, playing
all night long, piercing the night
till I could not sleep.Long afternoons on a blanket in the hills
far off the road, eucalyptus rustling
above us, dropping the brown bells of
their seeds falling around us on the damp
earth, as our voices reached beyond
themselves, breath merging into breath,breeze from across the bay, white fog
entering the Golden Gate, misting
his black hair glistening a halo
rising as he asked if I wanted to
sing again, sign again. Once one has begun
to sing like that--impossible not to.4.
In the Vienna Volksoper, Mozart's Queen
of the Night floats to the stage like an angel,
her train a cluster of stars radiant
in the dark, her notes so high they lift us
beyond the carved ceiling, beyond Schonbrunn, wide
ranges of the Danube, the Alps.How long has it taken this soprano to learn
these trills, these amazing reaches
of lung, of open throat? In the opera's
last act we see her flattened
on the stage floor, a trap door lowering,
removing her from the climacticfinal arias, the reunions of all
the others. We have lost her
high notes rising, pushing the limits.
What is it that prefers still
the quiet, lower tone, the unlit match, well-mown
lawn, small murmur of a low, shy hum?
