Walking Around Or How I discovered I would not go gentle into that good night.

It so happens I am tired of being the grey woman,

and it happens that I walk into a vintage clothing store

to find an item here with an almost invisible stain,

there with a waist too small to pull over my shoulders

or step into with a shimmy.  Me with the deeply carved

cheekbones and blue eyes sinking into their sockets,

like a topographical chart in three dimensions,

I don’t want to walk out of the shop door emptyhanded.

The smell of a man drenched in shaving oil 

revolts my nose, my dry eyes attempt to water

in response. The only thing I want is to stride

down the street towards the solitude inside my walls.

The only thing I don’t want to see is the back of a train

leaving me on the platform, the only bench directly

in sunlight and occupied by a man wrapped in blankets.

It so happens I am tired of my aching back and feet,

and my heavy eyelids and heat radiating from the sidewalk.

It so happens I am tired of being the grey woman.

Still I might discover joy in swinging my old lady

handbag at the head of a woman haranguing her man,

then abandon my assault weapon on a westbound train.

I’ll suck light out of street lamps and cast an ever expanding

darkness, wondering which fish I might jerk out of its element-

gut it, roll it in flour, and fry it in a skillet spitting grease.

Better than yelling, a predator’s silence, more anger than hunger.

I don’t want to go on as mist on poorly developed film,

as fading shades of color on chemically unstable photographs,

an artifact in two dimensions, with no identifying notes

scrawled across the back, no dates, no names.

I don’t want to go on as a mist or an image jumbled

into a box with a number of faces, without provenance.

At about 3:00 am in a long morning of wakefulness, I heard Pablo Neruda “It so happens that I am tired of being a man.” We have in common a fatigue with roles assigned to us by society in regard to sex, age, religion. . . . His sentiments fit my emotional landscape- a forest of questions about what I had accomplished in my lifetime, sloughs of despond over failures so small as to negligible, and city streets lined with missed opportunities and broken ideals. My complaints focus on my identity as a woman of a certain age, enjoying the privileges and the difficulties of becoming invisible, who after a lifetime of maintaining her balance, feels as if she might fall.

Adjectives that I associated with becoming old would once have been grace, dignity, and wisdom. My resistance to the idea of being angry about aging and death is melting as I face diminishing hearing and eyesight, loss of muscle tone and vocabulary. Maybe Dylan Thomas has it right after all. A little anger might help me hold it all together longer.

So I went through my collection of translations of Neruda and found that Robert Bly translated it as “sick of being a man,” in Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems purchased at San Diego State sometime in the seventies. Repeating some of the phrases he repeated kept my cursor moving. A recent trip to a vintage clothing shop that has the most marvelous display windows provided specific images. (For $119.00 I bought a dress only slightly younger than me that once sold at Sears for around $20.00. I needed something to wear to a Judy Collins concert for our nineteenth anniversary). Then I reach negative statements. Why is it so much easier so say what I don’t want that what I do?  The closest I can come to identifying what I do want: I want to be heard. It’s hard work to insist on being heard.

I wasn’t sure whether the resulting poem is a parody, a pastiche, a send up or a tribute to Neruda. What began with light-hearted mimicry turned dark along the way.

Don’t let me fool you. Most of my writing is purely instinctual, that of a magpie drawn to bright things. I just can’t resist talking back to other poets. Maybe my blogs are port-mortem analyses. They allow me to say directly things that poetry is designed to cloak so that the reader may uncover/discover it. It’s a chance to add those details left out because they didn’t serve the poem. Just when I admit to myself that it’s unlikely that anyone reads my blog among so many blogs, I become fascinated by some aspect of me and my work and post again. I did the work, and maybe I’ll get lucky and find a reader.