Stasia Ward Kehoe Quotes

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.

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'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 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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Dare I tell them that since I came here to dance
I have been giving pieces of my body away
To ridiculous diets,
To repeated injuries,
To Remington?
And that maybe
I think
With each bit of my body
I lose a little piece of my soul

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

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.