Under the quotidian hum,
I sometimes hear them, my cast-off
selves in their forgotten box—the girls
who rode horses, ran races,
rowed a boat alone on deep water,
who sang soprano in the church choir,
and the woman I was when,
young and balancing
on the piano’s adagio, my arms
carving phrases into the air,
the gritty New York light
slanting the studio floor,
filling long legato lines, spilling
across the half notes opening
a window through time, I turned
into Orlando setting down his pen
to follow late sun through the gold-green
fields Woolf wrote for him, an escape,
and I, suddenly beyond my body,
became someone dancing
better than I ever had
until that song was done.