Quotes from Stasia Ward Kehoe

I feel his arm Lightly Over me. He takes one of my outstretched hands. Draws it beneath my stomach. "One more time..." This is not sex, Not friendship. Something Strange Special In the stillness of his breath, The waterlike way he moves. He is making a dance. We are making a dance.

I am pretty sure the myth of me Is better than the reality.

Wish my life were inside a book So I could turn to the ending, See if it is a love story Or a gothic disaster.

Thank God there are places with sounds that make me cry from beauty, not from pain.

Maybe he, like me, is engaged in the kind of unspoken rebellion you don't want to perform too brightly since you're never certain anyone in your family will notice your darkened eyes, skeleton shoes, tousled hair, patchy attendance record. You may be sacrificing body and soul on a ghostly battlefield, fighting across a divide seen by no one but you.

Life is a big story. Music is just one way to tell it, to realize how many tales all kinds of people share.

It is strange to hear my words Read back to me. I don't think I wrote them To have them ever leave the page. I think I only write What happens across my brain When my feet are too weary To dance anymore.

Am I lonelier now Than when my sad imagination Had him disappear? Heart torn, Loosing tiny droplets Of sorrow No tape can measure No needle can mend.

I play the music of Steven for Steven; ragged, helpless, it owns me, enveloping me with an incomprehensible love -

Do I dare ask him for what I want, As if I knew it, Could find it on some page In some chapter In some book?

The tips of my overgrown bangs dip into the wet of my tears. My fingers, forehead, moisten with sweat. I fight the slipperiness, press the valves firmly, play the love, the hate, the misery, the hope, the freedom that I wanted, never wanted, can't have; that doesn't exist.

Does it matter that people and things Have words, Have names? If not, Why read any book? A litany of useless letters Detached from bone, muscle. Or are words the only things that make the muscle, bone, memory, movement, Person Real?

It seems to me that every day Is an audition.

I hover over myself Watching. Mind and body separated, Each in control As though there are two puppeteers Working the strings of my marionette self.

Is truth here In the ugly unseemliness? The graceless moments Before and after Eyes are watching? In the unballerina The unperformed?

Her body disappears like my voice When I look too closely in the mirror Without the pages of a notebook, a pen To save me.

Let's give our slave a big dream. A big future.

I wish I could concentrate on dancing Instead of spending so much time pretending I am still in junior high But with Rem, I want to be sixteen Or, like Alice in Wonderland, Sometimes smaller, Sometimes bigger still.

Now, the edges of these memories sharpen. I see the cracks in the studio floor beneath her feet, The lack of turnout in her fifth position.

What was true and solid begins to slide, dissolve. Your thoughts unravel faster than a satin ribbon Whose edge hasn't been burned Until you sit amidst a tangle of limp, pink threads, Unable to reason At all.

Are we alike In that in-betweenness? Can he see, When I smile my blue eyes back At his brown ones, The country-city-woman-girl Dancer, student Bewildered Unbelonging Yearning?

I've a long time trying to love a brother whose only way of touching me is pain. A long time escaping into music. Practice, lessons, rehearsals that protect me from the hurting parts of life. I've been winning awards, applause, acclaim for my trumpets since I was in grade school. But love? The word catches in my throat. Do I love anything? Have i forgotten how?

I calculate the breadth of Steven's shoulders, now wider than mine; watch him tear open the Blokus game he likes to play with me after school; count the hours between now and Dad coming home to take over and I am only a little afraid of the night.

There are more guys than girls in jazz. Next-to-no lady trumpeters (oh, there are a few) but it doesn't matter because, for me, jazz trumpet is all about one guy Miles Davis. He made this famous album in 1959 called Kind of Blue which is kind of, always, how I feel. That album gets into your bones goes and goes starts, hesitates, reaches out, feels for the music, the sound, the thing you want to change. Always grasping for the unattainable makes you kind of excited, kind of sorry.