The Girl Who Wrote Poems

The first was in her mother’s ragged junior high autograph book:
 
“The River is flowing
The River is flowing
Your hat is blowing
Please don’t let it blow away!”
 
Since she’d attempted cursive handwriting, her mother didn’t chastise her. This she understood as encouragement.
 
At age eight her commemoration of our 16th president was posted on the bulletin board:
 
“1809
That was the time
Early one morn
Abe Lincoln was born.”
 
There’s more, now lost.
 
At nine, her study of familial hierarchy, thinly disguised as an ode to television, was published in a national educational magazine. At the time, she was living with a religious aunt and uncle, and entertainment was strictly monitored. Nobody saved the publication.
 
At age twelve, she wrote a poem she considered worthy of Dickinson:
 
“It is far worse
To kill a rose
Than to cultivate a thorn.
The rose may never live again--
But from briar, a rose is born.”
 
She agonized over its syntax and meaning, should anyone ask. No one did.
 
She read poets from Spenser to Stevens to the boy who sat across from her in Spanish class to cummings and Carlos Williams, devouring anthologies of poets to imitate, lines to steal. She imitated, she stole, she bought fountain pens.
 
As a teen, two of her poems were chosen by the high school English department for submission to another national educational magazine. Both were printed. Once again, the publication was not saved.
 
A friend of a friend in another town copied one of these published poems and turned it in for his own English assignment. This poem was published in yet another national educational magazine, under the friend of a friend’s name. “Did his family save my poem?”, she wondered.
 
She wrote furiously into the night: poems about injustice, poems about boys, poems about her own insecurity, poems about boys thinly disguised as poems about nature, about war, trains, loneliness, etc.  
 
In college, of course, she read Plath and Hughes and fell in love. “What are you writing?” her beloved asked. When she told him, he bought her a journal.  “Keep writing”, he said. She did.
 
“The perfect poem would have no words,” he announced one day.
 
She tried this revelation on her Interpretation of Poetry professor. He was unimpressed.  “I didn’t say it right”, she thought. “Maybe I don’t even understand it myself.”
 
Then they married. 
 
“What are you working on?” her groom would ask.  He was always working on something: woodcuts, his abs, plays, furniture design, drawings, performance art, cross-country cycling, learning to cook, to sail, to play the violin, to fly a plane, to tap dance. . .
 
“Nothing;” She wasn’t lying.  “I think I need to see a therapist.”
 
She did, five days a week.
 
“Are you telling her about me?” he asked. He didn’t believe in shrinks.
 
“Of course not”, she lied. She began intensive phobia aversion therapy.
 
She lost twenty pounds and took dance classes. 
 
They rhumba-ed all over their dreary apartment. 
 
“Are you writing?” he’d ask from time to time.
 
“I’m working on it”, she lied.
 
She got a job out of town, had several affairs, and finished phobia therapy.
 
“I want a divorce”, she said.
 
“Alright”, he said.
 
She moved to a bigger city.
 
On the nights she was alone, she started writing again.