A Memory, a Monologue, a Rant, and a Prayer
Looking for the Body Music
Michael Klein
My friend Frank calls it looking for the body music—the music my mother heard.
At the end of looking for the body music, one stumbles upon a woman’s body
with the whole world taken out of her—but before that scene,
a foreshadow: my mother at the boarding school.
She’s twelve, child of two alcoholics, vaudevillians, shadows on a stage.
She’s overweight and sees beyond herself even then, so the girls
are mean in their pressed dresses and routinely hang my mother out
the window by her feet for a long time waiting for the exactly right cadence of please before they pull her back into her life.
That was in 1940-something—the year my mother began
the book her mind was writing called this is what happened to me—
the book she read to us—pill-language to cushion the abyss of two marriages—
one husband beat her up, one husband took her money and broke her off
with the world until she got written as the failed suicide after hanging by a thread
by a hair, by her feet, borne of her fierce suspension
over something called a youth.
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