Ugh. I have such a bad cold. On the bright side, my new baritone voice makes me sound like Lauren Bacall, but unfortunately I do not feel that I am also looking the part. It is very, very hard to be sexy with a cold. I bet even Lauren couldn't have done it.

So in honor of my cold, I will post a poem about being an invalid. It also happens to be my very first attempt at writing a poem using a male narrator. I imagine him as being rather like poor tubercular Robert Louis Stevenson.

Convalescent

 Dawn Potter

Bright morning in a garden chair

on the esplanade, mummified, half-prone,

amid shawls and thick rugs,

pleased to watch the steady wavelets

 

chink among the stones of the shingle,

the rain-dark weed; couples sprinkled

athwart the plage in rational pairings,

small ones crouched at the margin

 

of the tongued sea, white-frocked mothers

paused above them, parasols bowing

under the clean wind like cormorants.

And we helpless, not unhappy ones

 

also take the air—infants, fragile parents,

consumptive collectors of nature—

our rôle in the seaside schema clear

as looking-glass to any novelist

 

or digging child: we are the audience,

safely tucked beyond a cavernous

proscenium: no change, no dénouement;

our part mere endless, watchful pause.

 

Even I could pencil volumes in the room

of this eternal morning, placid time arrested,

every actor idle now, except my wife.

Fifty paces lonely, down the gravel walk,

 

she ducks the crown of her hat

gravely into wind—so thin, so spare,

yet she presses forward and away,

eager ship bound for passage,

 

fruit of the Indies sweet as her mind’s eye,

though her only voyage is this solitary

foray to the jetty, servant of wind and salt,

gull-compass, adrift in the northern sea.

 

How simply she recedes.

A gust lifts the hem of her dress: and half

my heart cries desolation,

half croons its own brief hymn to solitude.

Even ardent sentinels require space

for love, a narrowed lens,

each elastic link of habit tense

and re-invigoured by our loneliness.

 

Tide splinters over pebbles, a rampant gust

seizes heedless gulls; the mothers on the beach

cling to parasols; and on the esplanade,

we invalids rustle in our chairs,

 

alarmed by autumn’s deadly kiss.

Far down the jetty, my doll-wife pauses,

then turns, landward, hands to her hat,

brim bent, dark ribbons flying.

 

Now is the season of departure,

rich kick of wings into the east wind,

an avian ecstasy of sinew and speed.

Nothing seems less likely than return,

 

and yet her lips shape a query.

What rights have the earthbound

to answer nay? I raise my book aloft,

air drums between us like a harp-string,

 

and she begins to laugh, one glove

clutching her hat, the other

her fluttered skirt: the wind tears

at her hair; and laughing still,

 

she flings up both hands to me,

to the gull-current, sky

awash with ribbons, with silk;

and she runs.

[first published in the Connecticut Review]

Dinner tonight: bay scallops with lemon and white wine and parsley and butter, and maybe I'll make spatzle as well.