i think
it was 1969
and we were sitting on
the floor in the front room of her house,
playing
records on the stereo.
i remember
playing Steppenwolf
and Simon and Garfunkle.
i remember
she had her shoes off
and was showing me her feet,
how they
were all messed up
(even at such a young age)
from
so many years
of standing en pointe
and she said she wasn’t any good
and would
never really get
anywhere at it because
she was too short, but she loved dancing
and nobody
was gonna see her feet, anyway.
at eighteen,
i thought i was a poet,
but i never read Herman Hesse
and only
knew Steppenwolf as
a rock band and it didn’t really matter,
because
there was Leda
who was right about being
too short to be great ballerina,
but
she was
young and beautiful
and had a
flower behind her right ear
and
she smelled like
just cut roses and fresh grass.
she had
real short red hair
and hung around with a
crowd who spent summers at the lake
and liked
to talk about their
new cars and all the money they had.
i don’t know
why she went after me in the first place,
but, she did.
maybe she
thought i was different…
which i was,
because i was
young and dumb and awkward
and when i
walked across a room, i could
feel my brain balanced on the top of my head
and it was a
challenge just getting from here to there,
but
i thought
i was different
and thought i was a poet
and maybe that’s what Leda saw.
because
Leda was a dancer and
deep down inside of her she
didn’t like the lake and she really
didn’t like talking about cars or money.
i only
knew her for
that one summer,
and
our “romance”
(such as it was) only
lasted a couple of weeks,
because
the play ended.
i
didn’t
tell you we were
in a play together, did i?
it was
a lousy play and
i was a lousy actor and
it only
lasted a weekend
and
she sent me a
telegram on the opening night,
which
i thought
was the coolest
thing anyone ever did.
yeah,
Leda was a dancer
and
i was a poet
and
i finally did
get to read Steppenwolf.
i thought the band was a whole lot better.
