phanaerozoic

On January 18, 2011, Garrison Keillor’s Writers Almanac public radio spot featured a humorous poem by Jason Fried entitled “Daily I Fall in Love with Waitresses.”  Several weeks later, poet Susan Thurston, who couldn’t resist the temptation, answered with her poem, “Daily I Fall in Love with Mechanics” (Feb. 8, 2011). The two poems can be found on the Writers Almanac web site at:

<http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2011/01/18>

and

<http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2011/02/08>

respectively.

 Of course, the gauntlet had been thrown with Fried’s poem, but Thurston’s response led to downright poetic anarchy.  The group of local writers, the Wayward Poets, that I belong to and meet with weekly at Mead’s Corner: A Fair Trades Coffee House here in Wichita, Kansas, couldn’t resist joining in the fray.  Soon love was declared for cowboys, mailmen, baristas, meter maids, and so on – you get the picture.  I shared one of my poems, “Daily I Fall in Love with Poets,” at a read-around at the Kansas Authors Club 2012 convention in Salina, Kansas last weekend, and was encouraged to post it.  So here it is, a bit of tongue-in-cheek poetry for the day:

 DAILY I FALL IN LOVE WITH POETS

 Daily I fall in love with poets,

with their ink-smudged notebooks, their names

stamped in gold leaf on the linen covers:

EDNA  EMILY  ELIZABETH  SARA  CHRISTINA,

female poets with pens in their hands.

I love how they make me trace their women’s words

through lines that flow

like the curves of their clinging smocks,

their conforming skirts, their cloaked shawls.

I love the ones as slender as their

first slim volume of poems,

and I love the ones with the fullness of form

of their collected works.

I love the femininity of their free verse

and the sensuousness of their sonnets,

their proper but passionate parsing,

their wanton ways with words.

In reading their printed poems

I can imagine their graceful hands gliding,

feel them inscribing their verse and rhymes

on my parchment skin in India ink.

Daily I fall in love with poets pictured

posing on the covers of chapbooks,

prim or purposeful, pouting or pert.

They know the secrets of prosody

and I want them.

 They have husbands and children and lovers

or all,

but are always pictured alone,

like Edna posing beneath that Magnolia tree

her first year at Vassar.

Daily I fall in love with poets;

I pull out one of their books:

one standing upright on the shelf,

or one leaning, provocatively, 

against its neighbors,

but in the end I am invariably left hungry

for another poem, and always, always,

I arrive at the colophon

all too soon.               

– Roy Beckemeyer

(Inpired by Elliot Fried’s “Daily I Fall In Love With Waitresses,” and Susan Thurston’s “Daily I fall In Love With Mechanics,” and dedicated to Edna St. Vincent Millay, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sara Teasdale, and Christina Rossetti)