SHE, THE PREMIER POET, HAD DISAPPEARED
by Christine Trzyna
She, the premier poet, had disappeared.
'Off the face of the earth,' they said,
leaving me to think she had gone deeper underground
on the spoken word scene than they knew.
Maybe beneath the floorboards of a closed and vacant bookstore in Reseda,
where photocopied posters were still stuck with tape.
Maybe in the library archives of Cal State - Northridge,
where they digitalized
but it wasn't easy for a researcher to be taken seriously in person.
Maybe she'd appeared in a video that Brendan made,
having you sign under false pretenses.
Shown at parties.
Making a fool of you for the pleasure of his guests.
A sadistic ritual.
Infamy.
Maybe when Murray turned her into a cover girl
the publicity was just too much.
Bags of fan mail, too many letters,
unsigned love poems that rhymed?
Other people with her name appear on the Internet.
You just didn't know it till you'd read a while
that she could not possibly be the mother who wrote about her son.
I recall the disappeared poet back when
she knew who she was.
She pretended incompetence at running a vacuum cleaner,
moving it over the fringe of a tattered Persian rug in the forever twilight,
which broke the vacuum and ripped the weave.
Then she departed.
Who did we think she was?
She was not a maid,
not with her way with words.
She might fill the room with people
but the toilet would remain grunge.
She herself had never been known to go in there.
Everyone wanted to know her,
not just the name on the flyers that drew them closer,
to benefit from a brush with her,
to keep a vigil,
as if she was the lint that could light their bonfires.
To say she was their close personal friend,
that they wrote where she did,
though she was mostly alone at an undisclosed location.
Here and there,
Everywhere,
she was hard to pin down.
Deliberately.
They listened.
Her mother perched on a stool at the back of the room.
Her daughter on stage and earnest.
What had she created?
Was there such a thing as a career in poetry?
Her gentleman offered all she would accept, such as rides places.
He waited for her to one day recognize him,
standing with a dusty fedora in his hand in the back.
He waited for her to know his nobility was what kept him at arm's length.
He waited for the virgin who finally made a choice.
Maybe she lightly rests in an unmarked coping grave of her own choosing,
Far away in a crowded cemetery in New Orleans.
Where only a vampire,
with his heightened sense of smell, could find her waiting.
Down on her wedding day,
Someday she might emerge from the chuppah, holding a candle.
I recall the disappeared poet back when she made high pitched squeals
and jumped as a cartoon, her legs back, never forward,
almost kicking her own ass.
Weeeee!
On a teeter-totter only she could see.
Had she been flung into a hospital?
Were there visitors?
Everyone wanted to know her.
Her deepest, most inner being,
a darker side that hadn't made it into print.
"That would not be good," she said.
I recall the disappeared poet who had boyfriends
who were men in prison.
Stuck away for a life time.
They knew it.
She did not but she wrote them.
Sister, they called her.
Sister!
Maybe her prison was poetry,
from where you must remain a keen observer
like a spook that makes it through the wall behind
and sees over someone else's shoulder.
You sit reading one of her chap books quietly.
Your dog senses something.
Can you sense that?
But she escaped
And is now truly living under an assumed name,
that you could never guess.
Or, maybe
she's become an ancestor
who once put Los Angeles poetry on the map.
Los Angeles has disappeared without her.
March 30 2023 7:05 am - 9:00 am
C Christine Trzyna
