April 3rd poem

Elegy at 45

A friend’s message says she’s too angry to be

Buddhist today.  There is loss and there is loss

and there is loss and there is loss. I read my

horoscope.  Life is not a puzzle to be solved,

it says.  It’s hard to break a lifetime habit of seeing

one’s life as the plot of a novel.  Didn’t Aristotle

say something about plot?  But then, he saw women

as flower pots.  When my son was born, my mother

said, “Now you’ll never be alone again.”  My look

of panic then.  Elegy for loneliness.  Elegy for

an earlier self-image.   Elegy for my sex drive

and the different shape my vagina used to have. 

There is some normal degree of relaxation. 

The new gyn says that. If you think I’m making

a joke of my body, that’s on you.  (She’s spiraling,

you might say.)  Elegy for my lost spinsterhood,

elegy for city life, elegy for the polluted earth

of my childhood, elegy for the atmosphere, elegy

for when I saw the university as a haven, elegy

for my youthful arrogance, elegy for

my impatience with men noticing my youthful

“blooming,” elegy for being a poor kid a white girl

a reader a professor.  I taught the Modern Tradition

once. The male professor who hired me (lovely man)

asked me about my look of anguish, told me

to “project it outward.”  Listen, if I start projecting 

it outward now I will never stop watch out.