This past weekend I took part in the annual Saint Joseph College Alumnae Reunion. This was the small women's college I attended fifty years or so ago. It's been closed since 1973, but we still meet each year. What does that say about the bonds we made in that little college out in the country so many years ago?
Here are two poems I wrote about the place:
The Pink Trees of Emmitsburg
It is the first of all mornings.
The curtain rises,
the mountains bow,
extend pointy fingers
to a huddle of pink trees,
tulle ballerinas
in a world of black tights.
The audience,
hitherto numb and slumped,
gasps.
The outlandish pink trees
shake their stiff crinolines
and the whole theater stirs.
The audience feels
loved like brides
in a world of divorces.
Too frilly,
too old-fashioned,
the critics huffed.
The management closed the show,
closed the whole theater.
Only the caretaker
sees the pink trees dance.
They still dance,
so out of hand,
so outlandishly beautiful,
to the wind’s applause.
Margaret
Her black Irish eyes,
practical as tile,
suddenly open like onyx wells
as she snaps out of sleep.
The ragged breath
slips and then catches
on the edge of the cliff
from which she hangs,
and she’s back in the bed, saying
What day is it?
What day?
It’s the cusp of October,
humid, tropical, storming through the long afternoon.
Delirious, she’s letting old secrets
slip out around the oxygen mask.
She’s emptying the last closets
where worries of the details of graduations,
anguish of lost colleges,
irreplaceable keys
quiver in the corners.
If the moon answers to the name
Old Woman Who Never Dies,
What should I call her,
whose waning hand holds mine
as she pulls away from me
into the air of the clean cold Sunday morning?
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