Poem of the Week, by Joyce Sutphen
I was a girl, walking along the Charles River in Boston on a sunny day, no one else within earshot, when suddenly a young couple got out of a car next to me, the girl in a tight sundress and heels, big smile, radiating friendliness. Her male partner silent, a half-smile on his face.
The girl was full of questions for me. She invited me to join them for coffee, tea, lunch. It’ll be fun, she said. That big smile. But something in me was wary. Something in me knew to smile, excuse myself, and back away.
I’ve never forgotten this five-minute encounter. It’s haunted me for decades, but why? Because they were going to do something terrible to you, I woke up thinking a few weeks ago. They were going to do something indescribably awful, and somehow you knew it.
Last week some friends and I were talking about all the narrow escapes in our lives, all the twists and turns of fate that somehow we’d eluded. Do you think life is just a never-ending series of lucky misses? one of them asked.
My Luck, by Joyce Sutphen
When I was five, my father,
who loved me, ran me over
with a medium-sized farm tractor.
I was lucky though; I tripped
and slipped into a small depression,
which caused the wheels to tread
lightly on my leg, which had already
been broken (when I was three)
by a big dog, who liked to play rough,
and when I was nine, I fell
from the second-floor balcony
onto the cement by the back steps,
and as I went down I saw my life go by
and thought: “This is exactly how
Wiley Coyote feels, every time!”
Luckily, I mostly landed on my feet,
and only had to go on crutches
for a few months in the fifth grade—
and shortly after that, my father,
against his better judgment,
bought the horse I’d wanted for so long.
All the rest of my luck has to do
with highways and ice—things that
could have happened, but didn’t.
Click here for more information about the wondrous Joyce Sutphen.
alisonmcghee.com
Last month I was in the foothills of the Adirondacks, poking around my parents’ giant vegetable garden (the thing could supply a small farmer’s market) talking tomatoes and beans with my father. Every summer and fall growing up we had an assembly line in the kitchen, washing and chopping and blanching and bagging zucchini and corn and beans and all kinds of squash for the freezer. Like most of the men I grew up around, my father always wears a hat (cap for everyday, hat-hat for solemn occasions), goes to the diner every morning, knows how to drive a tractor and change its oil, and has spent his life working hard and helping his neighbors and voting in elections. Joyce Sutphen’s elegant, fierce poems bring me back to my childhood. Some of them, like this one below, bring me to tears.
She copies her friends and decides to write a poemish thing a day for a month. After all, if they told her to jump off a bridge, sure, she would jump off a bridge. Why not?
Alison McGhee 