Who said your real voice is not the choir?
—Steven Nightingale, “Who Said, Who Decided, Who”
and if you are not only the melody
but also the baseline, the harmony,
the descant, then who’s to say
you’re not also the quarter rest,
the fermata, the coda, the clef—
and perhaps you are also
the hand that wrote the score
and the woman who loved
to take that hand in her own
and wander the halls toward bed.
And perhaps you are also the rumpled
sheets, the ones that never made
it to the choir, the sheets that fell
to the floor while the notes
made their way uncomposed
into throats of the singers,
the air full of such improvisational grace
you’d swear the angel choirs
were singing, too.
