“My heart leaps up when I behold
A pickle in the sky. . . .”
--A Wordsworth Parody
My mother and Mrs. Byrd conspired to make me a poet.
Mama put the first poem I wrote in grade school on the refrigerator. Then she put it aside for a scrapbook. Blue ink in my early cursive script illustrated with an apple tree and a scottie dog. (Oh memory! I went looking for it: Fourth grade, in pencil, tree with blue flowers, no apples, no dog.)
Mrs. Byrd gave me two gifts. She read Caddie Woodlawn aloud, chapter by chapter, after lunch. each day. She required us to put together an anthology of poems. Hence my discovery of the watermelon pickle and Louis Untermeyer’s Rainbow in the Sky. I assigned each poem I chose a category, copied them out by hand, and provided a table of contents.
They are scattered through a three-ring binder that is one of my treasures. The binder itself was military excess. The blue-gray fabric edges are in tatters. It is filled to bursting with poems I copied by hand all the way through high school. (At home printers were not a thing in the seventies.) The only reason the whole thing isn’t one big pencil smear is that I wrote on only one side of the paper.
First a group of Spanish poets. Gabriel Zaid’s “La Ofrenda” in Spanish and English, translated by Daniel Hoffman. Juan José Arreola’s “Cervidos” translated by W. S. Merwin long before I knew who he was. Then Aiken, Anderson, Bronte, Cummings, Dickinson, Dunn. . . . At one point I alphabetized it. (God knows why there are two or three separate runs through the alphabet. The last poems are Maya Angelou’s. Loose in the back are some song lyrics (Helen Reddy’s “I am Woman” and “Blowing in the Wind”), a description of Theosophy, quotes about Taoism. . . . I feel the urge to create a table of contents for the whole collection. Resist.
The collecting continues. I get a half dozen or so poem-a-day emails. If one begs for a rereading or to be shared, I do not run upstairs to see if it’s included in one of my innumerable books of poetry. A search for older ones in anthologies could take hours.) I send it to the printer. A really fat manila folder of them rests (hides) in my study closet.
There are so few artifacts of my youth. With my father in the military, so many moves. My first journal, in a similar binder, lost. A vase my father gave me, lost. I have the scrapbooks and poems, so many poems.
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