MEMORIAL DAY

Precious Little “

“... the passageway down which they had just gone was bright as the eye of a needle.”

Eudora Welty, Losing Battles

So we’d gathered to talk about writing,

remembering great ones who’d recently gone

from our midst and the various ways

they had followed each voice through

the needle’s eye into the clearing of art,

when a novelist slouched

on the front row opined

that the only real subject is battle

and how men survive it.

I seethed while my student poets,

all of them women, sat waiting for someone

to challenge his vision of literature,

belligerent canon

where warring tribes battle it out

in their epics and blood-spattered novels.

“Miss Welty,” I countered, “stayed

clear of the battlefield, if you recall.

She sat down every day at the same desk

and made language raise the world up

from the grave of our common amnesia.”

He barely acknowledged

my comment. He wanted to flirt.

with my students. He shrugged at me,

stood up and showed off the fit

of his tight jeans. My god,

what a chasm he opened up right there

between us: we stared like combatants

across the trench, loading our weapons,

his now on full frontal display,

along with a first novel already lobbed

to reviewers by Random House. As for me,

middle-aged poet, what were mine?

Precious little. The shot I recalled

having seen months ago of a woman my age

holding up to the camera a photo of daughter

or sister or good friend who’d disappeared

into the rubble of felled towers, the same woman

I had seen sifting through ruins in Fallujah

or Kabul, even now cringing

when she hears the gunfire in Baghdad,

a woman who stares back at me

when I’m dusting my daughter’s face

framed on the shelf,

smiling out at a day that’s been gone

for so long I can barely remember it,

nothing much going on, no bombs,

no fireworks, just late summer afternoon

and the dogs asleep under the oak tree.

(from COMING TO REST, LSU Press, 2005)