Poetry by Misty Wycoff
I imagine myself in a hallway,
outside a music room with a piano,
hearing but not seeing
a small girl beating out the high notes
both hands in flight.
The plunking, clinking of the black and whites
filter into the day, surround me,
pairing themselves
with my heart’s new rhythm.
Weeks ago, a surgeon’s wire found its way
up inside my ventricular chamber,
testing, burning little bits of me
forcing the impulses to find
a better pathway.
And now, a knowing,
a felt shadow, a trace of a presence.
Somehow like that time, decades ago,
when I came home from the movies,
to my house, which had been robbed
and the hair on my neck was upright.
It wasn’t what was lost,
but the intrusion
that left its mark.
In the space that holds my heart,
there is now something else.
A memory perhaps,
of a girl, touching a piano,
the long wires setting something free.
I see her skirted legs swinging
beneath the dark piano bench
laying down the beat.
This new music has settled with me,
escaping the keyboard,
passages in the air
both found and lost,
all while she, determinedly,
tries to find the newest tune.
Born to a world of high grass, crawdad creeks, and sharecropper orchard houses, Misty Wycoff’s early life was often spent in solitude, perched in the low branches of an old cypress tree, communing with the ranch dogs and wild animals, or barefoot, clamming the mudflats around Bodega Bay California. After nearly twenty years in Los Osos, she finds a deep resonance here to the land of her upbringing. Her first book High Rain came out in 2019, and she is currently editing her eighth book, Dwelling, which should be in local bookstores by early 2025. Contact through website is: bmistywycoff.com.