Red Letter Poem #288

 The Red Letters

 

 

In ancient Rome, feast days were indicated on the calendar by red letters.

To my mind, all poetry and art serves as a reminder that every day we wake together beneath the sun is a red-letter day.

 

––Steven Ratiner

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Red Letter Poem #288

 

 

 

 

Necking

 

 

Though we were the same age, maybe twelve at the time,

Delores Perkins was a good head taller than me

and a challenge to kiss.  I had to hold my mouth up to hers,

and she had to bend over me and dip her lips to mine

like one of those drinking toy ducks that, once you got it

started, bobbed and bobbed and bobbed, and went on

bobbing until you stopped it, this even when we were

sitting down, side by side in the musty plush seats

of the old Capitol Theater (seats that my mother warned

probably had lice), a flickering, fluttering dusty shaft

of light from the projection booth just over our heads.

 

To take back the initiative, I had to twist myself around,

up onto one hip, and stretch to raise myself to her height,

the elbow of the arm I had around her pressed to the wall

behind us to help me balance, my free hand wanting to cup

one breast or the other but held out and away, squeezing

the arm rest, not permitted by Delores to do anything but 

kiss her and kiss her until I ached from the waist down,

and then, after the movie, the Saturday double feature,

when we stepped out blinking into the afternoon light

Delores—where are you now, Delores?—made me follow

about ten feet behind her because she was taller than me.

 

 

                                             ––Ted Kooser

                                   

 

 

 

 

Indeed: where are you now, Delores?  Ted Kooser has posed the question; and now we, too, would like to know.  Ted––as I’m sure you don’t need me to remind you––is one of America’s most distinguished poets.  He’s the author of scores of books featuring poetry, essay, memoir and children’s stories.  The complete accounting of his honors and awards reads like a densely packed page from the OED, but surely these must top the list: former United States Poet Laureate; winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry; and Presidential Professor Emeritus at The University of Nebraska, where he taught younger generations how the dailiness of our lives can yield the most vital and authoritative poems.  I would be remiss if I didn’t add that Ted’s most recent poetry publication is Fellow Creatures, a delightful chapbook of 27 animal and insect poems he published recently with Red Letter Editions to help raise money for this project’s continuance.  (If you have an interest in purchasing copies, you can visit: https://stevenratiner.com/product/fellow-creatures/)  Ted is an 86-year-old, four-time cancer survivor, but approaches each new day with the sort of energy (not to mention a sense of acceptance and gratitude) any of us would feel fortunate to possess.  Nearly every morning, he wakes early and, before the chores of his Nebraska farm, spends an hour or two at his desk, allowing free rein to an imaginative life that seems inexhaustible.  When he shared one of those morning poems with me a while back, I earmarked it for this holiday honoring a third-century Roman saint, where we celebrate love in all its unruly manifestations.

 

The very title of the poem, “Necking,” alerts us to the dated (or one might say innocent) nature of this memory.  When the poet compares Delores’ descending kisses to “those drinking toy ducks that, once you got it/ started, bobbed and bobbed and bobbed, and went on/ bobbing until you stopped it,” how can you not smile and wince at the same time?  Of course, it would be difficult to overstate the vital importance, within the adolescent mind, of how we appear to others.  So while there was a clear attraction between the two twelve-year-olds in Ted’s wry poem––and few forces are more powerful than the hormonal imperative, that dizzying siren song of desire––the fact that the boy was so much shorter was a shame the girl chose not to bear.  And something of that rejection has not lost its sting, three-quarters of a century after those furious bouts of kissing.  I was entranced by the narrator’s gymnastic machinations, trying to regain “the initiative,” hoping he might be able to advance beyond osculation to the storied first or second base of a boy’s yearning.  But Delores had her strict boundaries, and Ted’s “ache” was not to be relieved.  Perhaps that makes the memory all the more enduring.  And that “flickering, fluttering dusty shaft/ of light from the projection booth just over our heads” hints at a more adult, and perhaps less authentic world, towards which these young people are being inexorably drawn.  Many decades later, the ‘movie’ playing inside the poet’s mind has the power to turn back time and restore something of the body’s primal knowledge.

 

As for that pressing question: I believe I can tell you exactly where Delores is.  She is living in the neural village this poet has erected inside his mind.  She is still twelve years old, alluring, a lofty presence for this diminutive boy.   She thinks often of those perpetual kisses inside the intimate movie-theater-darkness––even as she relives a kind of purgatorial embarrassment, always walking away from what might have been true love.  Or teenage lust.  Or simply that half-blind ache whose intensity was meant to instruct us: we are living now.  This is hardly unique to Ted’s experience––we each have built a similar refuge: some situated in the midst of a metropolis of memory; others, a more solitary hamlet on an expansive Midwestern plain.  All we ever were, and all we’ve discovered, remains in residence there––though perhaps there is a propensity among poets to visit them with greater frequency than most.  It is a beautiful anomaly that living now is richer because it contains as well our living then, and also our vivid might have lived.  I, for one, am grateful that poets like Ted Kooser found a way to reproduce that neural landscape in ink, an enrichment for all my living to come.

 

 

 

 

The Red Letters

 

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https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices

 

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