Imaginary Poet in a Real Job

A glance back sideways into my past

Photo by Mor Shani on Unsplash

Before I retired at the start of 2020, I worked at back-room administrative jobs in a series of local nonprofit organizations. (I say “series;” I stayed at the last one for nearly 22 years.) I was known to be a stellar employee. I was also known to be just that little bit off-beat.

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MAKING TEA FOR MICE


They dislike the smell of peppermint,
I am told, and so I raid the office kitchen
for boxes of a tea I seldom drink,
moisten the frail sachets and tuck them,
steaming and fragrant, around the rims
of plant pots where unseen visitors 
have dug, strewn soil across the shelves
around my desk. For a day or two
the shelves stay clean, I steep myself in work,
until the morning I come in to find
another strewing – and so I brew more tea,
and peppermint becomes the flavor
of my final months of office life.
If I told someone who could arrange
for traps or poison, well, they would,
and so I don’t; no, I keep making tea,
the kind I seldom drink, keep hoping
that such indifferent hospitality will be
enough to shoo these unseen guests away.

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

One of my pre-retirement projects was re-homing the assorted plants and stuffed animals — all gifts or rescues — that had accumulated in my work cubicle. By the time I left, the shelves around my desk scarcely remembered the smell of peppermint. I wonder if the office mice missed me.

I expect my employers missed me sorely in some ways when I was gone, and in other ways I expect they didn’t mind having me go. I’m not good with hierarchies. I had somehow flipped past whole chapters in the office socialization manual. And I was endlessly aware that, however well I did the work, I didn’t belong at that desk and didn’t want to be there. Some days the Don’t-Want-To was a bare whisper underneath my workday persona; other days, it was as apparent to me and everyone else as a bad case of poison ivy.

My theory was that I could work a straightforward backroom admin job during business hours and still have time and energy for, you know, my real job, writing poems and maybe fiction. The reality was that I was (am) really bad at compartmentalizing and really good at codependency, and I let ‘way too much of my time and energy get siphoned off into office politics and personalities. I could — I did — go months between writing one poem and the next, during the years I was holding down a “real” job. Of the scant handful of poems I’ve written that have anything at all to do with my work life, most of them refer to it about as directly as this one does.

Of course I was hugely privileged to be able to earn a living wage in a safe and comfortable setting (give or take a couple of mice) for most of my adult life. And of course there are things I’m glad to remember from my former jobs, and people I’m glad to have known. And the fact remains: it’s only been since I retired that I’ve finally started doing my real job — living more thoroughly into my own skin, into a regular writing practice, into my own understanding what poems and poets are for. Maybe that’s a truth about me. Maybe it’s a truth about our collective assumptions about which jobs are real and what kind of work deserves a living wage. Maybe both.