POEM: Borrowed Illumination
Alberta Turner was a professor who had taken poets under her wing. One of them made sure I became another.
She taught at Cleveland State University and took over its poetry center with this philosophy:
“Whether they’re academic poets, street poets, language poets, or living-room poets, it really doesn’t matter. Whatever opens your soul, that’s fine.”
She had a great and poetic retirement plan: collecting islands—a fine meeting place for the muse. Among her several books, she also authored two poetry manuals: Fifty Contemporary Poets: The Creative Process and Poets Teaching. Not all can. Those who do, and do so well, are rare and exceptional to know.
She marshaled three dozen poet-teachers to share how the work is done, using student poems. Checking the internet, I see that one of her books is still out there, still viable—used copy selling for over a hundred dollars. Daiquiris on the beach.
She was with me, way over in Texas, far from her island map, as I reread her poems, reliving our time. She used simple things to bleed complexity into a thimble—like using a parking lot light to read poetry while a teenager practiced driving in and out of an abandoned mall anchor, weaving through sectioned-off empty spaces, skeletons of a busier time.
Me and her, our islands, bumping gently like rafts—together once more, tiny in the seas of distance and years. Whatever opens our soul.
Borrowed Illumination
I am in the parking lot of a dying Sears
reading by borrowed
illumination.
I have two slim volumes
by a woman who took me
under the arm of her own muse
she never told me I would be this
half a century later
the one still alive
I have so many questions for her now.
Back then, we only talked about me.
She collected islands.
She had mastered the
skewed congruence
I could only recognize as fencing.
It was a fence of closets
only a longer life
could decode.
In that
we are still
together.
~~~~~