Contralto

I think someone in the long ago remarked how the secret of all comparison is contrast. Can it be that your fascination deepens because you’re so different, so distinct from any form or self-shape of me I comprehend? When you sit beside a student, first listening, then cajoling or commiserating, when you empathize in any of these ways then let your full-voiced laughter register, I have to listen in, not spying, eavesdropping, or monitoring, just feeling, savoring your sine-wave cadences, hearing that contralto-vibrant you, the half-conscious allurement in the voice—we who’ve ever sung refer to “the voice,” not “my voice” or “your voice”—that pattern, that rhythm you impart, just the occasional soft slide downgradient into a husk of vocal fry then up again in pure throbs of note-head: if only you knew this magic is yours, as I know it and heed it—then you’d know why I believe scansion, the strong emphasis in it, the chief stress, rides on melodic pitch, not how soft or loud, boomed, murmured or huffed; not volume, not reliance on impact-loudness. You’d know then, my contralto, how precisely song rules, even in your most tutelary phrases, your most prosodic zephyrs of advice…