After the Phone Call

you remember people the way they were when you saw them last even when the days number years even decades because it's impossible to envision them any other way and so that is how i recalled anna who once lived next door to me and had a honey maple table in her kitchen where she spent many hours seated at a captain's chair strumming her guitar and singing hymns or folksongs although sometimes she played a hammered dulcimer until the notes slid under the front door and surrounded the house and traveled across an empty lot and continued up the hill until they turned around and came back again into her home and settled on the piano and transformed into clear notes like the notes anna sang when she wanted to jump over words and rest in the music just the way she knew how to jump over the small rocks in the stream that ran along the campground in montreat north carolina where the water was ice cold but warmer than the stream we all walked in after climbing down from old rag mountain which was my first mountain and I wore new boots and my blisters were a quarter big while anna wore her old hiking boots that still had embedded dirt from hiking parts of trails that meandered all over the south the same way she meandered in my house speaking to me of jesus and eternity while living on the earth as someone who loved women and fought against that love while losing because it's hard to chop off part of who you are even when you try and try she did while getting on her knees to ask for a way out the same knees that no longer work for her and the same legs that walked for miles now refuse to move without pain and the woman who roamed outside singing songs and scat singing now stays in and rarely leaves the house but this is not who i recall who awakened me to who i was who opened the door...