Poet, Incognito
Pssst ... it's me. Undercover in a cunning disguise.
My computer, bless it, tends to freeze up when I open Substack’s New Post screen to start writing. The work-around: enter a mode in my browser that allows it to ignore everything else the computer may be doing … at which point it announces, “You’ve gone incognito.” This tickles me. It also makes me realize: I’ve been operating incognito for years.
THE WOMAN WHO ACTUALLY WRITES THESE POEMS
No one who sees me believes it. A face like this
scans only for cheerful couplets, rhyming, plump –
not these frayed lines, taut with metaphor and grief.
I confess to anyone who asks:
the woman who actually writes these poems
is knife-thin, with bitter eyes and a soft mouth,
wears ink stains and old silver on nervous fingers,
has given her heart in turn to seven love affairs,
three religions, and one child, gone years ago.
Every night she paces my sleep, muttering similes
and maledictions; every dawn I sweep
the hearth, dust ashes from the crumpled drafts
of poems, sign them with my name. A lie
no one believes, a metaphor that never meant
more than the ink stains on her restless hand.
SINCE YOU ASKED Replies to Questions from Strangers No, I’m not on my way to play bingo. Cracked that code, broke the bank, sank every cent in a single trackside bet on the farmer’s dog. True story. No, I’m not a schoolteacher. Keep your children at a distance, and any instructions or lessons I offer, give a three-quarters twist to the right (I mean left) before you pay attention. No fooling. No, I’m not a nun – this faded costume is my cover, secret Carneval apostle to the Lenten, gray-gospelled grim-believers. A jazz chord in the church bells, an exhale of ouzo from that mouthful of water, a cat-scratch tickle up the inside of your bare forearm? My work, naked inside these plain, plain clothes. Believe it. Yes, I do know where this bus is headed; outbound, west, and west some more, across the beach and then (on special tires) across the water, to a floating continent radiant in the Pacific fog, an uncharted garden of forests, fruits, soft-muzzled wild things, and one bus stop. Return trips every seven years. You’re welcome.
[You can hear an audio version of these poems using the widget above the photograph. This set was extra fun to record — I hope you’ll give it a listen.]
“The Woman Who Actually Writes These Poems” has been following me around for decades. (The poem, I mean. Well, her too.) I wrote the first version of it in my twenties, and nearly every time I reread it I end up fiddling with one line or another, and for all these years the tension at the heart of it remains intact. Why don’t I look like what I am? Who told me what a poet [or a woman] is supposed to look like? Writing it in the first place — and tinkering with it endlessly — have been part of an ongoing attempt to define myself not by what I look like but by what I love and what I do. That challenge has complicated the life of nearly every woman I know … and most of the ones you know as well, I’m guessing. My advantage is that I get to turn the challenge into poems, whether anybody (including me) thinks I look like a poet or not.
What do I look like? Well, experience has taught me that I look like someone who can safely be approached with a question … very nearly any question. Fellow bus passengers, tourists lost in my fair city, new acquaintances at church, strangers in the check-out line at the supermarket — they hit me up. What else I look like you can probably gather from the questions answered in “Since You Asked.” Harmless, the questions imply. Functional more than decorative. Unremarkable. Unassuming. Bwahahaha … I’ve gone incognito. It’s only when I put the real answers to those questions into a poem that my cover gets blown. My bet? You’d pass me on the street every day for ten years and never suspect I’d written a poem like that. Heh.
Do you have a secret identity? Do you look like what you are? Are you so busy doing what you love that looks don’t come into it — and if so, how did you manage that? Feel free to leave a self-portrait in the comments. Or a sketch of your incognito, if you prefer.
I remember a bookstore owner in San Francisco who was trying to figure out why folks always seemed to ask him directions or whatever. I rather think it’s a combination of his seeming intelligent and approachable. Folks who seem intent on their way or intent on their phones, nope, not someone I would ask. But someone who seems to see the people around him, who seems to be enjoying her walk but not in a hurry, someone like that I can feel brave enough to ask for directions. And be amused and delighted to hear her explanation of the bus route to Brigadoon.
These are both wonderful poems! Several years ago, I had an idea to write an occasional series of poems called Self Portraits of the Poet, I only ever wrote one or two, but your poems today have me inspired to revisit this idea.