Years ago, I showed my book of poetry to a would-be lover, he himself a published wordsmith of the rhyming sort. He sat in a chair near the bay window in one of the Kansas City apartments in which I so ignobly misspent my youth. He disconsolately flipped pages. I gazed across the room, awaiting his decree. “They’re nice little homespun ditties,” he finally remarked.
I put the slim journal away and poured us each another glass of single malt. The conversation turned to other, less fraught pursuits, like where we would go to dinner and, quite frankly, his place or mine. I don’t remember the rest of the evening, overshadowed as it necessarily became with the embarrassed self-indulgence that drove me to offer my scribblings for his merciless perusal.
Years later, my estranged second husband sent me an email on reading something that I sent into the interwebs, one of these blithely tendered essays. I see you’ve found your voice, he noted. Well done, you.
I recently organized the rubble shoved beneath the bed in my lofted sleeping room. I found a handful of empty notebooks and one or two with carefully copied renditions of my hopeful poems. A familiar profile seen from a distance; / a cheek that I have touched. / A chin I have seen tremble. I turn the page. My soul is in my spinal cord. I know it’s there. / When I walk across the street, people stare. I let the volume drop to the oak table on which my printer rests. I lift another one, older, from my college days. What can I say to she who dried my tears, who spent too much time in crowded hospital rooms, and jails? I do not know / and so I talk of the silver markets / and over-sprouted beans. A decade later: The phone rings, and my sister says: Mary, it’s time to come home / and I know that she who once / so tenderly dried my tears / has gone home.
The verses proudly perch on the pages where I have penned them. Some bear dates; none come from this era, my essay era. I might have a few more somewhere, more recently authored. But most come from the decades when I still believed that I could only properly express myself in the lilting cadence of poetry. In that era, three or four of my poems got chosen for publication in a literary magazine. I can’t prove that; the journal folded years ago and I checked their archives without success. But I remember. I can even recite them, though I never do except silently, to remind myself that someone once thought my poetry had value.
I know a gifted photographer who strives to be a painter. The powerful images that this person captures with a lens haunt me; but still, they think only a canvas and brush produce genuine art. I understand. People like my essays; I won many a motion with my skillful legal composition. Like Niggle with his leaves, I hammer out a perfect sentence, stringing together a whole slew of them into an orderly package, and thus to the logical and satisfying end.
The fundamental flaw in this design lies with my personal satisfaction. A book takes so long; an essay overbears; a paragraph bogs one down in its internal structure. But oh, the poem! Lyrical, rhythmic, lilting. No extraneous words clutter its structure. If inside the heart of every goose there lurks a swan, my own breast holds the soul of a poet, longing to be free but never quite escaping the weight of its mournful and trundling pronouncements.
Mugwumpishly tendered,
Corinne Corley
The Missouri Mugwump®
In case you are interested, here are two poems of mine, published as a pair in circa 1978, in Eads Bridge, the literary journal of St. Louis University.
RED
knows limitless potential
for its rage is great
its enthusiasm
endless
its beauty renowned
while green is only
the cool air and
the chilled voice
that I use to send you home.
And what is blue,
but all that I have in me?
The rain we felt in April,
the wind,
all the poems that you read me.
Dresses that I wore to school
mirrors from which my image shone
a butterfly, trapped briefly then released
a child, once real then gone.
More, much more, too much to say
But there, and all in BLUE.
Both ©M. Corinne Corley, 1978, 2025. Like all my writings, and my photographs, these belong to me and are registered or in process of registration. Please do not reprint for any reason without permission. Thank you.
