Janis Ian (who spells her first name
the “correct” way, according to the woman

who gave it to me) sang that she
learned the truth at 17. I believe her.

But, at 67, this Janis is 17 again—
another odd truth. For instance, I’m back

in band, the only girl percussionist, playing
orchestra bells, whose ringing steel keys

I knew well at 17. My teeth are being
straightened again, voluntarily this time,

with molded plastic hugging all 28,
instead of tortuous clamps and wires.

I’ve also lately dug out the ModPodge,
dabbing blank postcards with watercolors,

affixing stanzas of my poems. At 17,
I decoupaged images and words cut from

magazines onto clean cardboard tubs
in which rainbows of ice cream once lived.

And later this spring, I’ll play in a band concert
honoring America’s 250th birthday,

50 years after my bandmates and I struck up
patriotic tunes for the nation’s bicentennial.

Just as I’m trying to wrap my (now gray) head
around the half century ago part, I chuckle

at the time machine that’s put me here
in my spacey poet brain (also part of 17),

picking up mallets and a gluey brush,
preparing postcards with abstract washes

of color and typed words and who knows
what else to fling me backward across decades

to land in the frame of that skinny girl
percussionist with braces and aching teeth,

who directed the pep band and edited
the school newspaper, scribbling daily,

hoping she’d be a Real Writer someday,
someone who wanted to live a creative life,

without understanding that she, lucky girl,
already was.