“A Case for Channeling Sad Spirits”
The woman who always eats alone is still eating alone. One whole day has passed since I last saw her. I wonder if she’s ever noticed me, balancing like a flamingo on the slippery rim of a courtyard fountain, listening for that one bird song, that one avian serenade that makes life worth living. I wonder if she checks under blue rocks at the river’s edge for signs of radiation, for her velvet red clutch that she had by her side the first night she heard Diana Ross live. I wonder if she has a lover or a husband, a family of grown children that rarely send her texts or calls. I wonder if she received accolades for scholarly work as an undergraduate? Or perhaps they gave her a certificate for perfect attendance. I should go introduce myself? Or keep it conspicuously antiseptic, hermetically sealed like my mother’s garden in June, how it looks like a spread in Southern Living. She looks tired. Her tulips are bullies to the neighbors, bragging about their exquisite color & shape, but they begin to fade in less time than it takes for straight-line winds to blow off the siding of her house. She had the pool filled in five years ago. Said she was afraid of it. Thought her friend-list was too long. One morning she quit breathing – just like that – and her body jolted as if a small bolt of lightning had been ushered from a cloud onto her metallic spine. She went somewhere and never came back. I eat alone often and can hear her breathing into a bowl of tomato soup.
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John Dorroh
Review by Zeke Sanchez
My favorite line is the very first line. The speaker in the poem is stretching it a bit in what he wanders about as he thinks of her: Whether she checks under blue rocks for signs of radiation? Whether she checks for her velvet red clutch she had when she first heard Diana Ross? Some aspects of the poem are “odd” but the whole of the poem somehow makes sense, holds together well and projects an atmosphere kind of like a French Impressionistic painting might. The woman looks tired but her tulips are bullies and brag to the neighbors about their beauty. She wonders whether her friend’s list is too long, again like Eliot’s Prufrock might wonder about the bald spot in his head. One morning “she quit breathing.” No explanation. The observer, the watcher of the woman, eats alone. He eats alone: she ate alone. He knew a few things about her: that she had a pool she feared, and that she once owned a velvet red clutch. Other things he imagined, and wondered about. “I should go introduce myself?” he wonders.
Excellent poem. Where the speaker wonders if the imagined grown children “rarely send her texts or calls” maybe should be “rarely send her texts or call her”?