Today I
found a rejection letter wrapped around a poem I wrote in 1968. It was from the
staff of “The Source,” the literary magazine at Whittier College. I didn’t know
then that it would be just the first of many
I would receive on my journey to becoming published.
Although
I know it dates me, the poem was written during my love affair with Rod McKuen.
I was obviously channeling him—his angst, his loneliness, his unrequited love. All
his books still stand on my bookshelves today. One, Listen to the Warm, was autographed by him after a concert he did in
L.A. I found the flyer and the ticket stub in the book—March 10, 1968, Hilltop Theater,
Tujunga—marking the place of one of my favorite poems. I can still recite it
from memory.
The poem was about his cat, Sloopy, who disappeared from his
apartment one night when Rod didn’t come home. He wrote, “I’d like to think a
golden cowboy snatched her from the window sill, and safely saddle-bagged, she
rode to Arizona. She’s stalking lizards in the cactus now perhaps, bitter but
free.” I've often thought of my beloved cats I've said goodbye to, that they were also snatched by that golden cowboy and are stalking lizards in the cactus--not bitter, but free.
Writer and literary critic, Nora Ephron, once said, “For the most
part, McKuen’s poems are superficial and platitudinous and frequently silly.” I
guess I'm in good company, then, although no one will ever recite my poem from
memory, even me. But here it is, in all its superficial, platitudinous, silly, and amateurish glory:
The Corridor
You move down the
concrete tunnel alone
in a crowd of faces,
seeing only emptiness
in eyes
that strip you of your
individuality
and make you, too,
one of the
poster-on-the-wall,
superficial,
hung-up
personalities around
you.
Then a stranger brushes
elbows with you
in the crowded corridor
and is suddenly
no longer a stranger.
The touch is all you
share
but it seems a prelude
to much more.
The hall no longer is
quite so impersonal
now that you have a non-stranger
to stand with for a
moment—
within, yet outside,
time,
elbow-to-elbow,
mind-to-mind.
Alone together
you watch the tide of
faces
surging around you
sweeping you along.
Parted by the crowd
you lose touch
and are alone again,
alone in the expressionless.
But that elbow-touch
of that non-stranger
remains
as does the mind-bruise
he left,
and the corridor no
longer seems
quite so long,
so empty,
so dark.
I’m not
sure why I saved it, but it certainly is a testimony to the fact that I’ve
always wanted to be a writer. So now I’ll tuck it back into that scrapbook where
I found it. Someday, when my writer daughter is cleaning out my house, she hopefully will get a chuckle out of it.