When she was 20 
my mother escaped 
from Bellevue, Ohio to Cleveland,

enrolled in secretarial school, hoping
she might elude her mother’s watchful gaze
and the ghost of her dead father.

I can almost see her, just before the War,
her wavy brown hair and shining face,
hazel eyes slowly opening to the possible.

In secretarial school she perfected
how to turn a boss’s words to hieroglyphs,
bewitch them back,

type them up in triplicate,
carbon paper between sheets.
Dance of fingers over gilt-edged keys.

In her new suit, hat and gloves
(paid for how? poor as she was),
high heels making her a giantess,

she won work with a corporate law firm,
learned all the clients’ 
names and voices, how to prepare

agreements, deeds and wills,
stock certificates and billing,
personal letters and the kids’ term papers.

Sleekly clad, careful 
not to smile too wide and show
a mouthful of cheap dentures,

soon valued for sharp mind
and quick fingers, she swam 
upward from the secretarial pool,

became one lawyer’s jewel.
Living at the Y with other women
newly fledged to city life,

shy duckling 
transformed, dreamed
a limitless horizon.

~

At eight I taught myself to type
one-fingered, right index a blur
above the keys, but slow, as typists go. 

When I reached high school
she decided I must learn touch typing.
Out came the yellowed secretarial books

designed to make an adolescent
mewl, out came an autocrat.
First the memorization of the keyboard,

then the assignment of each finger 
to a group of keys, mastering
an aerial ballet, wrists straight, never

resting. The same pattern of strokes
over and over. Eyes not on hands’ work
but on the passage to be tamed.

Almost to a metronome, the even
clicking of keys easing me through years
of stories, pieces for the high school paper,

college essays, editing and freelance gigs, 
until in middle age I chose safe haven,
became amanuensis to a lawyer,

transcriber, telephone-answerer, aide,
as my mother was, as my young self
determined I would never be.

Nearly Zen, the float of fingers
over keyboard; not-quite-Zen,
his voice emitting from dictation tape.

Listening to and trimming down his tics:
in the interim; frankly, I am shocked and appalled;
you can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away;

although, of course, you can, and most folks do.
Headset on, mind partially engaged, able to
transform him into chipmunk or slow-spoken walrus,

able to erase his voice entirely,
but choosing to be good, be kind, 
a sometimes amiable, sometimes perfect scribe.

		~

Immersed in her girls’ needs,
Girl Scout troops, piano lessons and the PTA,
she didn’t talk about those typing days

when she was free.
Much later she turned secretary
for one church, then another,

embarked on years of ministers’
notes, mimeographing newsletters,
transcribing blurbs of ecumenical joy.

Quietly efficient, discretion
modified by glints of devilishness
shimmering through decorum,

how she must have shocked
avuncular pastors pleased by her work,
worried by her wit,

as she once stunned
businessmen and soldiers
sauntering Cleveland streets,

that tall girl with the beautiful
legs and hair, the gentle eyes,
the unexpected twists of speech.

She also wrote short stories, 
poems, corralling idle thoughts 
between long bouts of work.

Something genetic maybe,
an inherited bent for bending
words to paper, your own

or someone else’s, sweet
hours given to ordering
nouns, verbs, preposterous 

participles past and present, 
wild unruly modifiers. 
Near the end she was

obsessed with color, shape, 
intuitive strokes on canvas, though
she hadn’t seemed the type.

		~

What type am I, Helvetica,
Times Roman, Century,
Arial or Zapf Dingbat?

Most likely Courier,
carrier, cousin of
old Underwood, beloved

machine abandoned
as I teetered toward
the carpal tunnel. So many tales

pounded out on ancient keys 
when I was just 
a sliver of a girl,

in love with clacking
metal, all those black-eyed
a’s and o’s,

having to be banished
to the sunlit world,
ordered to go out and play,

weave stories with the other kids,
bump up against a chaos
I could not command

but tried to, making rules
they wouldn’t follow,
building structures they dismantled,

sneaking back inside to books
and notebooks, theory 
of control, not knowing

even the most restrained 
and tightly-reined of verses
tend to lose composure,

veer wildly from intentions,
break loose and gallop
where you never meant to go.

		~

Sometimes she’d say, What
have you been typing lately?
causing me to bristle, 

overreaction to a question asked
without a hint of guile,
insult unintended.

I don’t type, I write.  This before
transcription filled my days, 
when I believed myself more pure

than the employed could ever be,
was unconcerned with savings, 
pension, distant and unlikely illness.

If she were here I’d answer,
Legal briefs, mom, clients’ stories,
bucket-loads of case law, letters,

that’s what I’ve been typing,
those and snippets of unfinished
conversation between you and me,

first winnowed down by hand
on legal pads, then magicked
into type, the way you showed,

in wedged-in hours
before the day’s paid work 
begins, before the telephone,

here in the office that’s my
solace and my penitentiary,
where thought compresses

into little spaces marked by 
roman numerals on the clock
that tells me time’s run out.

In the nursing home
she curled into a cipher,
lost all her words,

hard drive wiped clean
of all the answers to the questions
that I never asked.

		~

Illusion of control but also
freedom, fingers poised 
while what’s inchoate 

pools, then spills
like water pummeled
over rocks by its own weight,

the way the caribou migration
gets itself in gear, one or two slack amblers
idling north, tugging

the attention of the rest
until the mass move
across hills and streams 

takes hold. Meander
never twice the same, 
hundreds of miles hoofed

to cover twenty. So what
if we end up exactly
where we’ve been before, 

mouthing the same pastures? So what 
if freedom’s just a word
to boost biology and happenstance, 

the fluke of one particular sperm
chatting up an egg,
genes that unloose language

linked to those that will destroy it?
Hands hesitate
and the screen turns black,

bezier curves invent themselves
in shapes and colors
evanescent as the acrobatics of a tongue

that no one translates any more,
in the moment just before
the shift begins 

from possible to formed,
droplets drumming
toward the waterfall.