My Diagonal Life

28th August 2010

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The True Story of What Was

A lot of people dismiss Ani Difranco as a smelly righteous lesbian, but I feel the need to say that this (purported) smelly righteous lesbian has written some of the most eloquent, universal truths I have ever heard.  Waiting in a massive line at the Secretary of State today, I heard The True Story of What Was again, and I got goosebumps as if it were the first time I’d ever heard it.

“Then in a flash, the light blue horizon, spanning a sudden black
is sucked into the vanishing point and quiet rushes back
to search for the downbeat in a tabla symphony,
to search in the darkness for someone who looks like me;

Though I’m not really who I said I was or who I thought I’d be 

Just a collection of recollections, conversations consisting of the kind of marks we make when we’re trying to make a pen work again;

A lifetime of them.

I say to me now here listening, I say to the locusts that sing and sing to me, sitting now here on the front porch of my eyes:

I hereby amend whatever I’ve ever said with this sigh.”