It’s not that I like rejection. I vacillate between responding well to it or ignoring it or putting it in the appropriate context and then sometimes taking it personally and deciding it’s a sign I’m the biggest loser. Or not even the biggest loser, just a pitiful loser, too pitiful to be the biggest loser.
But I keep putting myself and my writing out there, and that involves A LOT of rejection.
This Sunday, I’m presenting the amalgamation/transformation of rejection from a couple of places–a poetry book competition and a playwriting competition. Both were encouraging, but the answer was no.
I have this idea I’ve been working on since 2021. I write plays and poetry and want my plays to get produced and my poetry to get published. Somehow, in the month before I was set to have a hysterectomy (which coincided with a book competition deadline), I decided I should combine narrative poems written in the voices of particular characters into a play.
Wouldn’t that be cool? I thought and still think, to have a play that works well onstage and a book you could just open up and read the poems in order or randomly or whatever.
I got the manuscript done in time for the deadline, had the surgery, started attending a food behavior class from UW Eating Disorders Clinic, and went back to work, etc. etc. etc.
Since then, I’ve started and finished a lot of other projects (started way more than I’ve finished, if I’m honest). But the play-made-of-poems stayed in my head. It’s called Impelled. Here’s the news release I wrote & the poster I’ve been sharing on social media & putting up various places:
NEWS RELEASE:
There’s a lot of drama—and poetry—in an ordinary day.
Impelled, a new play by Marnie Bullock Dresser, premieres onstage in Spring Green on Sunday, April 27 at the Gard Theater from 2-4, with a staged reading and a talkback. Terry Kerr is the director for the one-act play set on the campus of a formerly-Baptist college. An administrator tries to help a student and a professor is sort of helpful, but under the surface of the everyday, these three characters express a huge range of thoughts and feelings and questions.
The actors for the staged reading are Melinda Van Slyke, Douglas Swenson, and Hannah Jo Anderson, all familiar to audiences in the River Valley and Madison theater scenes.
Marnie has published poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and journalism, and taught English at UW-Richland for more than 30 years.
Impelled is made up entirely of poems. But also jokes, sex, food, and God. By the end of the day, our characters are not just indulging in really good barbecue from a food truck on campus; it’s almost as if they have gathered together for communion.
A grant from River Valley Arts provided the opportunity for table reads, revision, editorial feedback, and the staged reading itself.
Note: due to adult themes and spicy language, the play is not recommended for those under 17.
I’ve been sucking it up and ignoring the awkwardness I always feel when I’m self-promoting. Yesterday I recorded a segment which I think will appear tomorrow morning on WRCO’s “Morning Show,” which you can listen to live or later.
All this is made possible by two things:
retirement means I can spend time not just on writing, but also on follow-through (the thing I struggle with the most, and the thing I found most impossible when I was working full-time).
I got an Artistic Development grant from River Valley Arts, a wonderful organization you should consider supporting.
It’s like growing carrots: on the surface it’s an ordinary day but below you may have giant carrots.
I’m hoping Sunday’s staged reading will lead to more good stuff for Impelled, but even if that’s somehow the end of the line, it’s been an amazing ride to get to work with the poet Rita Mae Reese on editorial feedback, and with Terry Kerr as my director, and three fabulous actors: Melinda Van Slyke, Douglas Swenson, and Hannah Jo Anderson. I asked my cast in an email if they had a word or a sentence they thought of when they thought of Impelled. Hannah said “rhapsody,” which honestly makes me feel rhapsodic, and Doug said “It’s like growing carrots: on the surface it’s an ordinary day but below you may have giant carrots.” And he included a picture, which I think is a good way to end this particular post:
I get that question a lot. Also: Are you bored yet? How’s the job-hunting going?
Not bored yet. Not job-hunting yet (that’s imminent, though).
My activities for the 23 weeks I’ve been retired fall into roughly four categories:
Flurry of activity related to life coaching
Sludge Time
A bajillion health appointments
Flurry of activity related to emerging from Sludge Time
I hired, as my life-coach, the amazing Kelsey Brennan, whom I know first and foremost as an American Players Theatre core company member (and who is currently doing a standout job as the lead in what may be my all-time favorite production @ APT, Proof, which is getting great reviews and selling out fast). She offers a complimentary session as a coach and I found myself so energized after that session, there was no question but what I wanted more. We met four times in April, as I was finishing out my last semester as a professor, my last semester at the now-nonexistent UW-Richland. Then we skipped May–I needed to focus on finals and she needed to focus on getting a new season started at APT. We met four times in June and four times in July, ending approximately on my 58th birthday. I got A LOT done related to that work, but the focus ended up being de-cluttering and making my front porch a useable space. There’s more work to do (PLENTY OF IT) in that regard, but it is a useable space, and sometimes seems almost magical:
I really can’t recommend Kelsey highly enough as a coach. Among other things, she is a Certified Professional Coach through the International Coaching Federation, a title she earned through completing training at UW-Madison. She is energetic and energizing and really, just a fantastic listener and insightful reflector, as in “I’m hearing you say ______” (which sounds kind of corny when I write it that way, but so many times she filled in that blank with things that yes, I was saying, but wasn’t realizing I was saying.)
Other interesting things I’ve done since retiring:
Did a fair bit of socializing on the porch, especially with friends I’ve been meaning to hang out with but hadn’t gotten around to hanging around with much in my always-exhausted/not-yet-retired mode. (I have a list. I didn’t make it very far through the list before it got cold. The inside of my house isn’t as ready for socializing as the porch.)
I’ve been active with the River Valley ARTS board, working on Make Music River Valley and an upcoming silent auction of some works by the amazing Peg Miller. I’ve taken over writing the newsletter for RV ARTS, and you can see the latest edition by clicking here. I also had the fun opportunity to be on WRCO a couple of times promoting RV ARTS programs.
I did the training to become a substitute teacher and may yet do that but am not quite feeling the pull of it yet.
I took my son for his first college tour.
I went two different times to a 5th Sunday Hymn sing, led by my amazing friend Susan Thering at the Little Brown Church, where we end every session by singing “Church in the Wildwood” with the lines, “No spot is so dear to my childhood / As the little brown church in the vale.”
I taught a class on failure and creativity for my amazing former colleague Dr. Valerie Murrenus-Pilmaier, who teaches at the Sheboygan UW campus.
I hung out with two more former UW Colleges colleagues and very much enjoyed talking over good times over good food.
I attended an online chapbook workshop offered by the Wisconsin Fellowship of poets.
I danced to Thriller (see this post for details on that!)
Attended the award ceremony for my friend Gail Hoffman who was awarded the Underkofler Excellence in Teaching Award. Her speech focused on the teaching cohort we had at UW-Richland, how devoted we were to good teaching there. She is currently thriving at UW-Platteville and credited them with being a teaching-first institution, and I think that’s true, but it touched me beyond words to hear Richland remembered so fondly and so accurately.
In between flurries of activity, there has been what I’m calling SLUDGE TIME:
It was kind of depression. Poems I began to write as I was coming out of Sludge Time (titled, imaginatively, “Sludge Time #1” and so on), have the recurring question: “Is this depression?” and then a question that answered that first question and asked another: “Am I still depressed?” Whatever it was, it seems to be done. I knew it was almost done when I started writing a lot. And I’m still writing a lot–I’ve listed several projects for myself for Nanowrimo, including writing poetry. I’ve been writing a poem a day for a couple of weeks now, all post Sludge-Time-Poems.
I think some of Sludge Time was exhaustion and recovery from having taught in a university system that has been chaotic the last 10-12 years. THAT’S A WHOLE OTHER SET OF BLOG POSTS. The recovery isn’t complete. The fury I felt when I learned the UW System had spent $480,000 to come up with a shitty logo was BIG. And the wave of emotions that came over me upon learning two more former UW Colleges campuses are closing was BIG.
Also part of retirement: health care for myself and my family
I knew I’d been going to a lot of appointments for myself and taking my mother to her appointments and going to some appointments for my Dad, but I was a little startled when I totaled them up. 32 appointments in the last 23 weeks. 10 for Mom and Dad (mostly Mom). One for my son’s wisdom teeth surgery. That leaves 21 for me. Five of those are physical therapy for my back (and those are ongoing). Also, x-rays for my back. A physical. Bloodwork. Sleep Clinic. Bone Density scan. Upcoming: MRI to check in on an incidentaloma in my pancreas. My health has not been fantastic but gosh darn it I’m working on it.
What I thought I might have done by now but haven’t:
Sent thank you notes for an amazing retirement party back in March. There’s really no good excuse for that lapse of good manners, but I will say this has been a really overwhelming time, the last year since the announcement that my sweet little campus would be closing. And one might express skepticism given how slow I’ve been, but I do intend to get to those thank yous soon.
Updated my resume/begun to network/started an actual job-hunt. That’s coming–for financial reasons and just sludge time reasons, I need to be working approximately 20-30 hours a week, starting approximately in January. More on that soon!
Finished cleaning out my office. BUT I’M WORKING ON THAT:
Clockwise from top left: UW Bitchland letterhead (UW Bitchland will never close, btw). My office from outside, with the overhead projector transparency of Emily Dickinson which I fully intend to leave in the window. Some Dickinson and Bishop books I haven’t packed up yet (with, I think, a cardboard cutout of Dickinson sticking out from between books). And my paper-thin, cheap regalia, because I was too cheap to spend money on something I’d wear once a year (I never attended my grad school graduations so I didn’t have any). I made a medallion out of gold duct tape because I found the medallions others wore to be (somewhat/very) affected and precious, and I just wanted to be able to point to my chest and say “Mine’s bigger.” Which I did at least four times.
Finally, this is like the creepiest thing I’ve seen in a while:
If you look to the left and downward from the Dickinson pic, you can see the shadow of the transparency on my blinds. It looks like an Emily Dickinson alien ghost. Also of note: the rusty slime that sometimes dripped on the inside of my office (state legislators and the UW System weren’t the only ones neglecting my sweet little campus). I really can’t think of a better image to end things with. Creepy, hilarious, poetic. C’est moi.
I remember when Thriller came out in 1983. I remember going to TJ McFly’s in Carbondale because it was easy to get into without an i.d. I remember the dance floor. I remember where the big TV was. I remember the guy I had a crush on who I met there. I think his name was Rod. I think all of that is true. What I also remember is that my friends and I learned the dance steps for Thriller and that’s how we danced when the song came on.
But now, having started to learn the actual choreography, I think we knew maybe one or two steps. And we probably looked great—I mean, we weren’t 20 yet. We were shaking our booties. We looked fine. But we didn’t look like the Thriller dancers except in my head.
And why am I learning the choreography? Specifically, it was to prepare for today, for an event called Thrill the World. Locally, we did Thrill the World River Valley, and it was a fundraiser for the Spring Green Community Library and River Valley ARTS (full disclosure—I am a board member of RV ARTS).
I do like to dance, and I like to have a few little dance breaks during the day as part of my pomodoro process. But I haven’t GONE OUT DANCING for a long time. I did all through college, and then graduate school.
My favorite two people to dance with EVER were my friends Dennis and Maria. Dennis was like a grandfather clock with multiple sets of arms and legs coming unsprung approximately in time to the music. I loved dancing with him (at a little remove, for safety’s sake) because it was a joyous thing, watching him dance. Then my friend Maria, a lot of times, her dance was kind of just rhythmic surfing. I was just sure between the two of them out there that absolutely no one would be looking at me and my little girlie moves. You know—“dance like no one is watching.” No one was watching. They were watching Dennis and Maria.
But of course, we should dance like people are watching and we just don’t give a fuck.
Which is what I did today. One of the reasons I signed up to be a fundraiser was because—well, it was a fundraiser. And good organizations were set to receive the funds. And I’m a board member of one of those organizations. Etc.
The other reason I signed up to be a fundraiser was to go public with my intention to dance in public and follow through with it. I was worried I’d chicken out (and that’s even before I started watching the tutorials and learned how freaking hard the freaky steps are).
Why would I chicken out? Well. My health is not fantastic. I’m ridiculously out of shape. I have asthma. And I’m in physical therapy for back pain. My spine has an official diagnosis to go with its damages and deformities, but I just like to think of it as having a rickety spiral staircase where all the helpful bones and cartilage should be. Movement wears me out and there’s a particular pain in my lower back I’m very familiar with and sometimes my hamstrings just SEIZE UP. But my awesome PT guy prescribed more activity, and this seemed like awesome activity.
So I did it. I watched the tutorial videos and went to an in-person practice. It wasn’t a stunning success leading up to today. I can free-form dance for 3-5-7 minutes without falling over, and I’ve been diligently working my way up to doing multiple minutes of the official Thriller dance steps, but an hour of mostly standing and repeating dance steps—that I couldn’t do. So I did a lot of from a chair. Which, you know. Not my vision of myself.
But damn it, I did it. Did I get all the steps down and do the whole thing? No I did not. Did I begin the whole thing by writhing on the street? Also no.
But here’s what I did do. I sat in a chair near the dance spot, and by the time the street writhers were standing, I was in line with them. I did the steps I’d learned: I zombie marched. I shoulder stepped. I booty bounced. I swam. And then I (kind of did what I was supposed to) and finally right-hipped and left-hipped and roared my way away from the dancers and into the crowd of people watching.
My son got off from his retail job in time to step outside and watch. He assured me I didn’t embarrass him, and that I wasn’t the zombie LEAST ACQUAINTED with the actual steps.
But even if I’d embarrassed my son, even I had been the zombie least acquainted, I’d still have done it.
And I’m really proud of myself. Grateful to the people who donated to my little personal fundraising page. Grateful to Stef and Phil, the zombie bride and groom. It was their actual wedding day today, and they did this as part of their reception. Too cool.
I’m reminded of Teddy Roosevelt, the “man in the arena” quote. Not that anyone has criticized me to my face, or would, but this part (even with the old-fashioned gendered pronouns) really resonates:
“The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
It wasn’t blood and dust on my face; it was makeup and baby powder to make me look pale. If we do it again next year (and I’m hearing we will), I hope to see more of those folks who were on the sidelines getting out there and booty bouncing along.
(If you want to donate to my little fundraiser page, you still can—I put the deadline down as Halloween. And remember—it’s my little spot, but the funds raised are going to the Spring Green Community Library and River Valley ARTS.)
Zombie eyes. (And my ridiculous hair, which kept just trying to look cute.)
We are an unserious country. We are a joke.
We say “thank you for your service” to police lined up before
we scream in their faces. This has to be funny. This can’t be real
because if it’s real, Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
is, like, the mildest imprecation possible. And maybe we already did.
Some weapons-grade sperm implanted strong, healthy, blond eggs,
implanted in the rivers lining the Midwest, somewhere between
the Mississippi and the Missouri, we were so pregnant we waddled
and gave birth so many times to nuclear idiots, venal and mean, and so white.
So many of them. So loud. So sure. So heavily armed. So angry. So white.
I don’t feel good don’t bother me. It’s not corona virus. I don’t think.
But how would I know? There are tests everywhere. Everyone who wants one gets one.
But not me. So I don’t know. It might be some other dread disease.
I have symptoms. But I veer so whiplashingly from hyper aware to oblivious
about my body, I don’t even know when I’m hungry. Everything hurts. Then nothing does.
I don’t need more books but I’m buying them. And buying them.
Support a local business, I tell myself. I don’t drink beer anymore. I don’t miss bars.
I miss someone else making my coffee. I miss someone else making me cookies.
I miss browsing the shelves. America why are your libraries full of tears?
The books miss being handled. They miss the browsing. Even curbside service
leaves them lonely. When you order the very book you want and someone pulls it
for you, there’s another book just three books down, a bright red spine
you’ll never see, a font that catches your eye, an author photograph you develop
an instant, serious, intense crush on, but not now, not when we’re quarantined,
not when we’re not sure where we can go or how to go when we go where we have to go.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
You and me both, buddy. When? Here’s the thing—when can I go shopping
and not think about washing every single thing I’ve bought? You and your
mid-century modern concerns. No wasted space on those worries. No flourishes.
You had no idea how lucky you had it. You stewed over the atom bomb
but one never went boom by you. That’s not why your hair fell out.
America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
We need a haircut. We need a massage. We need to go bowling. For the love of God,
we need to park in a row of SUVs and wear our Sunday best business casual khaki
soul suits and raise holy hands together, repeating structurally plain refrains,
daydreaming under architecture designed by industrial archangels bent on compliance
and ease. There is nothing sublime where all of us on stage wear a mic
designed to blend with our faces, making our projected voices seem miraculous.
America its them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The more things change, the more they
change. The more things stay the same.
The more, the more, the more.
Nothing is ever good or bad but America makes it so.
The tiny little campus where I’ve taught for half my life has always had
a lot of international students and I’ve loved them, 93% of them, for sure,
but now we have a sphincter in Arkansas mouthing they can come here to study
Shakespeare or the Federalist papers but not quantum computing. I don’t know but
I’m guessing the mouth-sphincter from Arkansas did not study Shakespeare. Or math.
One time I had a Russian student tell me he missed the Soviet Union.
He missed being in charge of half the world. I guess I should’ve warned someone.
Curvy hips on a girl and six-pack abs on a boy will take us wherever
we want to go if we also have good teeth, good hair, a willingness
to be provocative, to be deeply, deeply offended, to be filmed taking a shit. America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
Until the world collapsed, we had no unedited experience, no authentic
way of being in the world, everything styled, just so product placement, curated.
However now our roots are showing. Our nails have fallen off. Perfect lips droop.
The blush is off the rosé colored glasses. The blush was broken capillaries all along.
It’s going to get worse in the city on the hill before it gets better.
We flattened the curve to prove we could and now we’re whipping it
like a cowboy on a tacky tv show because we can. I don’t mean Hee Haw.
That’s where I first learned about re-runs. String Bean died, I knew he did,
but there he was on Channel 12 KFVS Cape Girardeau, as I lived and breathed,
as he did not. Someone explained it to me. Probably my brother who
always loved giving me bad news. Now we say of people who are dead
“at least they don’t have to go through this.” Of people so far gone in Alzheimer’s,
“at least he doesn’t know we’re not there.” This moment nothing seems possible except more
disaster. More terror. More sadness. More cycles of hot takes and outrage and bounce-backs
and war and corruption and always, always, another novel virus waiting in somebird’s wings. America is this correct?
I’d better get right down to the job.
Half-vast is way too close to half-assed,
both in how it sounds and how I do it,
aim for one and miss. Too slow. Too fast,
the one I want goes hurtling past.
Like ice melting and turning itself into fluid.
Half-assed is way too close to half-vast,
which is a measurement so imprecise
it’s no surprise I so consistently lose what
I aim for. Consistently miss. I’m slow. How fast
and clever and organized do I need to be?
I can’t begin to explain or even intuit
how perpetually close half-vast is to half-assed.
I still very much want my teachers to be pleased.
I want, I want. All my grinding duties
aim for safety and miss, too slow or maybe too fast
for anyone I want to impress to be impressed.
I had elaborate plans. They are somewhat ruined.
Half-vast is way too close to half-assed.
I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound so depressed.
It’s the middle of Finals Week. Other semesters, I’d be thick in the muck of a grading backlog, trying to get caught up so I could start grading finals. This time, I came soooooo close to having the backlog done before finals started coming in. Didn’t quite make it, but I’m still in a good place, on track to have grades turned in on December 23. Which is before Christmas. Which is fantastic. (I hear from my family I’m not very pleasant when I’m still grading over Christmas.)
Because I am a master procrastinator, and because over the years I’ve been slower than I’d like to in terms of returning graded work to students, I have a spreadsheet going back more than ten years with precise records–when students turned things in & when I returned them. This semester wasn’t my best ever, but it’s the best in a while.
Why? Was it because it was a lovely, unencumbered semester in which my family life was smooth as pudding and my work life was also smooth and lovely? NO. We’ve found 7th grade challenging in my house. We’ve been virus magnets this fall. And at work? Well , my campus administrator is moving on. In a couple weeks. And there’s work to be done.
And, oh, what else? Let’s see. My campus is in the process of merging (though we’re not supposed to say “merging” any more, I don’t know why) with a larger campus. All over Wisconsin, fine, little campuses are merging (not-merging) with fine, larger campuses. This has resulted in many, many more meetings and phone calls and emails. None of which are my favorite things about my job.
And yet. And yet. I’m feeling as genuinely copacetic as I have felt in a very long time.
Here’s one reason. In September, I listened to Episode 057 ,”How to Stop Fighting Against Your Life & Fall in Love With It Instead,” of the Courage and Clarity podcast. It’s a great podcast–each interview has two episodes. One is the “courage” episode, in which a woman entrepreneur explains how she broke away from her regular life and had the courage to do something risky. The “clarity” episode explains some specific process or task.
On Episode 057, Steph Crowder (the host, and part of the triumvirate at Fizzle.co, which I love, seriously, ♥, and which I’m sure I’ll write about more at some point) interviewed Catherine Rains, the Hotel Artist. I was hooked early on, because they were talking about “resistance toward the day job.”
Even before the merger-not-merger was announced, I was finding my job challenging. Maybe everyone does? But I’m working with Fizzle because I’m trying to develop a side hustle in creativity consulting, and part of the motive for that is being able to retire from my day job, which I’ve been doing since 1991. So even though I wouldn’t say I was miserable in September, was I loving my job? Happy to be there every day? Giving it my best? Prolly not.
A lot of this episode resonated with me, but this especially:
Catherine says that at some point she was in an academic job that wasn’t thrilling her, but she was captivated by a phrase she thought of, “What you resist persists.” So she started doing what she called a game, of saying, “This moment is my destiny” any time she was in an unpleasant moment at work. She also said, “I have lived my entire life to be sitting here at this moment doing this thing.” She said these things “over and over again for three months, and at the end of three months, I realized I had fallen in love with my job.” Catherine also talks about:
“learning new ways to surrender to what’s in front of me, as opposed to resisting it. Because resisting it is what keeps you stuck where you are.”
“I think that what makes people think that they haven’t gotten far enough is because they’re resisting where they already are.”
“When I stopped trying to get somewhere else, and fully sunk into where I was, that’s when the next step revealed itself, without me doing anything.”
There was just level after level of resonating for me. Somehow I decided to go for it. I tried saying “This moment is my destiny” and that phrasing just didn’t resonate with me. Maybe it felt too whoo-whoo. But then I tried, “I choose to be here” instead, and snap! Every moment when things at work seemed tense, when I was feeling tired of any particular task, when I just wasn’t feeling the love for what I was doing, I said to myself, “I choose to be here.”
It wasn’t as if everything was suddenly rainbows and sunshine, but there was a subtle transformation. Work just felt good. Within a week or two (which seemed sudden), I wasn’t working on my side-hustle to escape my job. I was working on my side-hustle because it was an important thing I wanted to develop to spend some time on now and more time on later.
Work just felt good.
So then when the seismic announcement of the merger-not-merger happened (about which I have many thoughts and feelings), my response wasn’t doom and gloom or terror. My gut-level response was positive. And still is. And as we move through the muck of making a massive transition for this merger-not-merger (about which I have multiple thoughts and feelings), I’m still saying “I choose to be here.” It makes a huge difference.
It’s a huge part of why I’m feeling so mellow during finals week, looking forward to a full day of grading tomorrow, a Solstice bonfire tomorrow night, more grading on Friday, then an email to students asking them to check my data entry one more time, and then turning in grades on Saturday. Then celebrating Christmas starting on Christmas Eve. And actually taking a week between Christmas and New Years where I don’t check work email. At all.
So right now, at the end of a tumultuous semester, I’m sitting in front of my Christmas tree feeling copacetic even before I take a single sip of the brandy I’ve poured myself. This whole method isn’t just for tense moments at work. It’s also for moments like this. I choose to be here.
I was at a fun concert the other night & one of the musicians was hawking t-shirts and said, “they’ll make you look 15 years younger and 15 pounds thinner.” I thought and then said outloud, “But I don’t care about either of those things.” In that moment it was 100% true.
What an interesting journey I’m on. The Health at Every Size book has certainly helped.
Before the play I watched her sit, posed, on a rock,
one knee bent up, near her chin. She was covered just so
modestly with what can only be called a frock,
one bright red shoe dangling from a pedicured toe.
Let me say more about her fabulous dress
which I got to observe going down the hill after
the play. Sheer and sleeveless, white, a mess
of summer flowers painted on the skirt.
Everything looked expensive and just exactly right.
I haven’t mentioned yet how old she was.
Seventy-something I’m guessing, which is why
it wasn’t a surprise to see her favoring her knees
as we made our way to the parking lot and why
I can’t get the way I saw her first out of my mind.
______
These are my red shoes. Not hers. Still.
______
I saw her before and after seeing The Unexpected Manat the Touchstone @ American Players Theatre (which is wonderful and which you should go see and which I will write about more if I can think of anything to say other than “perfect”) so of course I couldn’t possibly say anything to this woman about any of this.
I think she’d have a serious suit.
I think she’d wear a swim cap, no matter
how short her hair was currently.
I think she’d have a lane preference
and I think she’d express it to anyone
already there. I think she’d get her way.
Would she be a swamper? A splasher? A drifter? No,
I think she’d move through the water cleanly,
like an angry little otter. An opinionated knife.
She might critique my stroke. She might admire my
persistence. She might have a theory about how I float.
What would it be like to care so much
about everything? My husband’s like that.
I am not.
______
She’s got a new book coming out, apparently–will probably buy it. Still think about Sexual Personae now and then. This article brought her to mind.
So when it all comes down,
what it all comes down to, what
the answer is, the question is
how I did, how did I
spend them,
those bits of time,
my moments, my allotment of them,
what did I do with them
where did I leave them
did I wring them dry
did I use them well
then clean and oil them,
put them away to use again–
impossible–not something
I would be likely to do
and not something
anyone can do with a moment
I gorged on some
and let the shiny wrappers pile right up
and this one–this one
I’m holding like an injured dove
but there are more, so many,
so many, they scuttled away
like roaches or I stomped them
like roaches
and anyway they’re gone
______
I wrote this poem whilst on retreat at Holy Wisdom Monastery in Middleton, Wisco (a truly special place)
marniere 