-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 internees 

moving her space of earth backward in time. 

her grave is marked with an actual stone.

says here she died in 1966. no reason. just.. "died".

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.

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 awkwardly on a distant plot of ground.

Wardell, Ida

born 1908 / died 1966