Putting Out

Tonight's an occasion for one of the few readings I do in a year. As the wife of a stage actor, I should have learned how to overcome stage-fright by this point, but I have not. The only way I can cope with the anxiety of reading my poems in front of an audience, even one filled with good friends, is to create a persona who is the performer. Let's call her Zoom Majestic. She is my Bette Midler role model, big, busty, boomy, unafraid of belting out a song or strutting her poet's swaggle. With Zoom to front for me, I can put these poems out there.

The poems I'm reading are all about work, my jobs in the past, jobs I've observed others doing, the nature of work itself. They are from a manuscript I'm completing called "Workers' Compensation: Poems of Labor and the Working Life," nothing fancy about that. It's Labor Day, appropriately enough.

I do this reading in honor of my mother, Deborah Elizabeth Shannon Dresser, who was sole-supporter of my family from the time I was about 12 years old. Mom worked night and day, a day-job in the insurance industry where she eventually rose to become a part-owner of the business but never profited from it they way her male colleagues did, and a nighttime career of doing freelance accounting and income tax work. My most familiar childhood memory of my mother was watching her back as she sat in a secretary chair at an old wooden desk, sharpening her stash of #2 Ticonderoga pencils and leaning over large black ledgers into the wee hours. She did it to keep the wolf from the door--the wolf who could huff and puff and blow our house down with little impunity. The wolf had many names: taxes, cost-of-living, utility bills, back-to-school clothing, groceries, a car that could get her to and from work. But, mostly the wolf was poverty panting and shaking his ratty fur as he circled continually in our front yard. Here's a poem I wrote just as my mother passed away.

FEATHERS
for my sister, Karyn
One by one we remove white feathers.
With each our mother’s head softens,
lowering to the floor of her pillow,
releasing its burden. We make separate
stacks--my sister and --piling them up
from the sand floor of an old cottage.
Two small ladders of feathers
drawn from a snowy goose rising
as the pillow flattens into the quiet
where my mother rests her head,
a pebble of gold that sinks
to the worn tucked sheet.

When she releases her last breath,
another feather swims from her round mouth.
The feathers my sister and I carefully placed
scatter to the corners of the early-morning room,
trace their contours across the walls,
seep as if liquid light through closed window blinds,
finally nudging the hospital door open--
that heavy green hospital door
we will never open again.
-- Jannie M. Dresser 6/18/09