Day seven brings us Alison Apotheker, with a poem entitled “At One and a Half, Charlotte Wanders Off at a Concert on Kruger’s Farm,” from her first full-length collection, Slim Margin (© 2008, Word Press). The poem previously appeared in Oregon Literary Review.

THOUGHTS ABOUT THE POEM

There’s nothing fast about this poem, nor should there be. The narrative is tied to the anxiety of suddenly discovering your child is missing in an open public setting. Whether a minute or an hour passes before the eventual outcome, Alison piles tension upon tension as the narrator’s mind wanders from the unfortunate situation to shallow days to come. There’s a downright suffocation and out-of-breath quality that takes us deeper and deeper into worry, regret, and eventual release.

At One and a Half, Charlotte Wanders Off at a Concert on Kruger’s Farm


After a minute has passed
and she is nowhere
among the blankets snapped
and settled upon by picnickers
busy spreading hummus on their pitas
and humming along
to the off-key blonde up front,
This is how the story begins
is what you think.

That you can be aware of this
is how you don’t turn inside
out from worry, your heart
scarcely corralled against
all the endings you’ve ever heard,
and politely stop the band
and describe the blue dress,
the bare feet, which must be
chilly now that the sun
has dropped, and then you run

toward the crop sprinklers arching
across the sky like it’s a premiere,
the rows of tomatoes,
a red carpet you stumble along
with grass in your hair.
The crickets whir in your ears
like the clicking tongues of mothers.

There to the dusk surfaces
what you’ve believed from the day
your children left the dark pond
for land: they will lose their shoes,
their soles will blister.
They will wander without
allegiance, take up residence
on another woman’s quilt—
she will wash their cheeks, feed them fish.

You will be left to scour the groves
of honey apple trees and roadside gullies.
Black specks spin hurly-burly
before your eyes. Clouds speed by.
Your days, you understand,
will become as shallow
and unyielding as a sandwich bag.

Now a woman is flagging you down
from across the field. Your daughter
hasn’t realized she’s lost.
She’s pulling dandelions
and blowing their white wishes
into the breeze.

There they go, up, up, up,
struck dumb at the sheer luck of it.

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A Poet a Day is a month-long celebration of poets and poetry, in honor of National Poetry Month. Writers reserve all rights to their work, and all work appears with their permission.

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Tags: A Poet a Day, Alison Apotheker, National Poetry Month, northwest poet, Portland poet

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 7th, 2010 at 8:00 am and is filed under A Poet a Day, Creative, NaPoWriMo, poetry. Both comments and pings are currently closed.