-directions from the gatehouse-

(William is now friends with Miss Ida Wardell)

the plot of ground reserved

for this elementary classroom music teacher

lies in a remote location.

this remoteness is due to years of constant

clearing and expansion of land

made ready for the onslaught of new inductees

moving her space of earth backward in time. 

her grave is marked with an actual stone,—

small, slender, bleached-white,

arching slowly at the head and standing

slightly out of plumb.

small chips in its stone at the edges

seem natural now and at its face the marble's etch

is in poor condition as time-weathered burnishing

diminishes clarity.

says here she died in 1966.

no reason. 

just.. "died".

the grave is unkempt; appears to be
years without company and, well,–– lonely.

standing there, I imagine the fullness of her face,

the impossible girth at the sash of her dress,

the sweltering mouth at the pitch-pipe's disk,

her narrow eyes rocking like metronomes

over her attentive, stiff-postured students.

I was one of them.

she surveyed the classroom,

eyeballs brushing across us

like bristles in the process

of shellacking something.

she was unique,— a blimp of a woman,

gaseously floating before the eager

moorings of our disciplined expressions.

we breathed in and breathed out in the collective,
picking-up the pitch of her pipe, plucked from the scale

and the true romance is found etched at the face
of a simple stone weathered by time, listing
on a distant plot of ground.

Wardell, Ida

Inexhaustible Pitch-Piper

born 1908 / died 1966