Tonight's Poet Corner: My Gift

My Gift
by Belinda Roddie

The first time I heard music,
I saw color. Green for F,
blue for G, with the chromatic
blurring in dark purples and grays
when I could not comprehend the
delicate skeleton of sound. As I got

older, it became clearer: Everything
was absolute. Caress the piano,
and I could identify each separate
sigh perfectly without looking at
where the fingers of my accompanist
lay. The flats and the sharps,
the majors and the minors. Vinegar
and oil, water and salt. The seasonings
of melodies. I did not need a starting
tone to get the pitch I wanted.

When I turned twenty-five, things
became slightly distorted. It was
as if a knife already with a bite had
been needlessly sharpened further.
Every step on the staircase started
to blend together. Flats were naturals;
naturals were sharps. The congestion
in my ears led to an unwanted,
"heightened" state of being. It wasn't

always noticeable, no - most of
the time, all was well, and I could
happily go along my way, familiar
with the idiosyncrasies of each note
and its underlying stories. Still,
it was enough of a difference
to make me grow afraid, afraid

of losing everything. Of being
too nervous to sing for fear of losing
the key. Of strumming a chord and
no longer being capable of recognizing
it. Wasn't this only supposed to happen
once I was much, much older?

I joked to my fiancée tonight, "How
do you 'mere mortals' do it?" Those
are the ones who learned to sing
(and well) without my gift of absolutes -
all was "relative." I could have
been teased all evening about losing
the fictional status of a god. But perhaps
the ribbon holding the gift together was

made of spider webs instead of gold. Maybe
I was better off singing without worrying
about the specific pitch, hearing the colors
blend together again, or at least sharing
the ignorance of not knowing which
was which while the symphony rolled onward.