Agoraphobia

We wasted our twinness;

Knew it even then.

Did not harmonize

the six-four-three double play

or hit the close chords, become

the next Don and Phil Everly.

Did not develop a secret way

of speaking.

So at thirteen, I knew you

only at the piano

from each morning’s Sonata Pathétique,

your tempo, the pedaling,

the weight of your arms held 

like a crimped torrent, or else

sound sliding from your fingertips

natural as water drops on a glass.

Words in our house

(how often we were reminded)

were expensive. The doctor –

beyond the deductible –

to call this thing of yours

a condition

with a name – The fear

of leaving a safe place.

You must choose a between home

with a stack of Beethoven and

no one brave to whisper the unpleasant, 

to even ask a question, or else 

face junior high locker banks: Kicks and fists and cheap spits

of sissy, queer and fag.

Mornings, after mom and dad have gone for work,

after breakfast, brushing, packing –  

inside the front door you collapse. 

There, your sobs, voiceless,

leave space for the swing and click 

of the Regulator clock,

time on your side,

like measures falling

to that caesura where neither – 

or just one of us – must go to school.

You make me step around you,

            sometimes overtop you.

Then down the street I backpedal,

see you, at the window, watching me.

I want our gaze to break.

Let me imagine you –

your perfect preludes and fugues of Bach – 

all day in every key. But you only stare,

when we both know, in movies

this is when

you’d snatch your books, run

to meet me, or else

as I turn and walk away,

throw open the pane,

take to the piano, ring the neighborhood

with the sound of our fraternity,

launch me away on something flawless – 

perhaps the Rhapsody in Blue.

Rodd Whelpley manages an electric efficiency program for 32 cities across Illinois and lives near Springfield. His poems have appeared in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Shore, 2River View, Star 82 Review, Right Hand Pointing, Shot Glass Journal, Spillway, The Naugatuck River Review, Eunoia Review, Antiphon, The Chagrin River Review and other journals. Catch as Kitsch Can, his first chapbook, was published in 2018. Find him at www.RoddWhelpley.com.