Edna, Emily and Me

As tired as I am getting of the usual neighborhood/Stacy Park/St. Ed’s walks, I’ve been getting home so late (8:30 tonight) that I simply haven’t had time to be more creative.  So I took the exact same walk tonight, twice; once with Banks, back home to drop him off and hydrate, and back to retrace my steps.  It was a much more lighthearted walk than last night’s – both of the issues I was struggling with last night, and really troubled by this morning, were miraculously resolved today, one completely serendipitously, and one that required a little effort on my part. 

At Allison’s wedding a couple of weeks ago, I spent a lot of time with my friend Vicky from Colorado.  She being a very literary type, I asked her, as I always do when we’re together “What are you reading these days?”  She had just finished reading, “She Walks in Beauty: A Woman’s Journey Through Poems,” a collection of poems selected by Caroline Kennedy to celebrate the different passages of a woman’s life.  Vicky confessed that she has always loved Caroline Kennedy, so I was thrilled to point her to another wedding guest, Allison’s cousin William, who had served as personal chef for Caroline and her family a few years back.  I’ve always liked her myself, and even more so after I grilled William a couple of Thanksgivings ago about “What’s she really like?” She was always “Caroline,” not Mrs. Schlossburg, or Ms. Kennedy.  No matter how busy she was, she always took the time to ask William about what was going on in his life.  She had three beautifully-mannered children, due in no small part to her own vigilance and example.  And she had incredibly healthy eating habits.

For an English literature major, I have never really responded to poetry.  I don’t have the patience to linger over what I read, I want to plow through it.  I hated having whole classes devoted to one long poem, with all of us debating the author’s meaning.  The bottom line was, who the hell knows?  Your guess is as good as mine. 

But I picked up this book anyway. THIS is the way to read poetry.  The book is divided into sections like Falling in Love, Work, Motherhood, Breaking Up, and contain a mix of classics from Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Shakespeare, along with more modern writers.  And I’ve found a few that I love.  Tillie Olsen: “I want you women up north to know/ how those dainty children’s dresses you buy/at macy’s, wanamakers, gimbels, marshall fields/are dyed in blood, are stitched in wasting flesh/down in San Antonio, where sunshine spends the winter.”  It goes on for pages, and took my breath away.  This one from Georgia Douglas Johnson brought tears to my eyes: “The heart of a woman falls back with the night/And enters some alien cage in its plight/And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars/While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.”  Bear with me.  I found this short one by Dorothy Parker irresistible: “By the time you swear you’re his/Shivering and sighing/And he vows his passion is/Infinite, undying/Lady, make a note of this/One of you is lying.”

I love words, and maybe I’ve finally arrived at a stage of life where I can appreciate them in this forum.   I’m loving picking out just one or two poems a day, and really savoring the reading.

Here’s one more, by Gertrude Stein:  "Very fine is my valentine/Very fine and very mine/Very mine is my valentine very mine and very fine/Very fine is my valentine and mine, very fine very mine and/mine is my valentine."

Okay, that one’s  a piece of crap.