Poetry's fearless feral lover
... and other things I don't look like.
Two poems, one from Ago and one from last year, both exploring the same lifelong preoccupation: why don’t I look like who I am inside?
THE WOMAN WHO ACTUALLY WRITES THESE POEMS 1986
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 restless fingers,
has given her heart in turn to seven love affairs,
three religions, and one child, gone years ago.
Every night she prowls 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.“In a world where you can be anything…” 2024
In that world, which is
not this one, I would be
six inches taller,
with so-what cheekbones
and hey-now hair.
In that world, I would be
poetry’s fearless feral lover,
no more shaking hands politely
over tea cups; naked nights
and afternoons, inventing
new shapes and pleasures, laughing,
kissing away each other’s tears.
In that world, I would be,
especially, the arm of fog
reaching low from off the coast
to lie across the bay,
soft and silver and sparkling
in the sun, silver and soft
and tingle-moist against
the skin of the restless sea.
That first poem has been following me around for years; nearly always just one word to change, one line to rearrange, every time I read it. (Happened again as I was putting it into this post.) The second poem arose last year when the phrase in the title was floated as a prompt on Substack; it caught me on an irritable day, but responding to it improved the day considerably.
On any given day, the truth remains: whatever a poet is supposed to look like, I don’t look like that. I look like a church lady (not the Dana Carvey kind), or a library volunteer. If you saw me knitting on the bus or working a crossword at the window table of my favorite cafe, I doubt you’d think, “Wow, I’ll bet she writes dynamite poems.”
The mismatch makes me chuckle, some days; other days it makes me feel lonely. The good news is, when I’m in the midst of writing a poem, I don’t ever think about it at all. Well, hardly at all, and hardly ever. Okay, twice.
Moving. Both. You've shown us so much and given us even more to think about.
Ah! Thank you for this, Elizabeth. I once had someone say out loud to me in the interval of my concert, “You don’t look like a folk singer.” I was a little too glamorous for their taste — a little too sparkly. And at folk conferences I was a little too cheerful and too much like a kindergarten teacher. And when I feel sad, I look a bit too happy. Once again, in your beautiful way, you’ve touched something so complicated about being human — about having an inside and an outside.