Hey, kid, you made it

When you start dreaming early about being a poet, and when the dream comes true.

Photo by Glauco Zuccaccia on Unsplash

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IN A PLACE WHERE POEMS HAPPEN                                                     2021


A poet wakes long past midday 
in her tiny one-room, heavy with sunlit sleep
after night’s revels with word-song and rhythm,

wakes to a breeze rattling the window in its case,
a rustled swish of paper on the move --
props up her dozy head in time to see

the draft of a poem tilting off the windowsill
while another flutters, hesitates, then swan-dives
from desk into air, plunging toward pavement far below.

The poet blinks, puffs out a sound between
a chuckle and a curse, throws back the worn red quilt,
jumps first to close the window -- peering out and down

to count the escapees -- then shoves on shoes, grabs keys,
and clatters down stair after creaking stair, so many
she no longer counts them. Astray on stoop,

sidewalk, and avenue, a dozen sheets have scattered, 
some flat, some bellied still with breeze and motion;
she chases each one down, dodges across the street 

for the last page, oddly crumpled, hugging the base
of a telephone pole, scribbled she sees in pencil
and not her favorite pen, and -- wait. No, it is

her writing. Is it? Hers, but not; and the words are --
wait, again. She stands mid-sidewalk, silent, reading,  
her mouth bemused into a small girl’s grin:

When I grow up
I will live in the City
in a tiny room
up a hundred stairs,
with a scratched wooden floor
and a window that rattles.
I will sleep all day
underneath a red quilt,
then get up and drink coffee
and eat fruit and sweep the floor,
and write poems all night 
at my desk by the window.
At dawn I will choose
which poems are best
and copy them clean 
and put them in my pocket.
I will run down the stairs
and into the street
to tack the best poems
to poles and to trees
for the neighbors to read
and be glad that they live
in a place where poems happen. 

She finishes the last lines, face alight, and turns
to the telephone pole; finds an ancient thumb tack
sunk there, pries it out and thumbs it in again, posting

the page she has just read. The rest she folds into
her pocket as she turns to cross the street, looking both ways
then up, high up, where late-day sun has dazzled

the panes of her apartment window, where for a second
she seems to see a small round face peer down at her,
a small shy grin. Hey, kid, the poet whispers

to herself, to all her selves, before she climbs 
a hundred stairs up to that shabby well-swept room, 
Hey kid, you made it. Look at where you are.

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[You can listen to an audio version of the poem using the little widget above the photograph.]

“What do you want to do when you grow up, Elizabeth?”

Like most kids, I answered that question differently at different times — depending on who was asking, on what was uppermost in my mind at the moment, on what expectations I thought I needed to meet. The times I felt safest and least conflicted, though, I could let myself say it: I wanted to live by myself and write poems. Where I wanted to live might vary — sometimes it was a tiny apartment in my favorite city, sometimes it was a cottage on the coast of Wales (with, oddly enough, a flock of goats). The essentials were the same: a small room, a big desk, a window, solitude, and poems to write.

Did I dream of selling the poems? Surely I dreamed of having them read; surely the uneasy thought crossed my mind, even as a kid, that writing poems by itself would probably not pay the rent on the tiny funky apartment or the Welsh cottage. From the get, I knew this dream was impractical — that’s why I kept trying to replace it, or make it a small part of some other dream.

Nevertheless, it persisted. And lo and behold, when I look at my life now, it’s the dream I’m living. Long deferred, surprising in some of its details (hello landlord’s carpet, hello hello Substack), and hard to live in to some days for reasons I think the kid I was would understand … and even so, a dream come true. Hey, kid, we made it. You made it, keeping poems in your pocket all these years and never letting us forget them. I couldn’t have done it without you.