Frances Ruhlen McConnel
Valedictory
For Tom: Poet, University Cop, Marathon Runner
On the back steps of Padelford Hall
we run into each other. He says
it’s been over two years and he’s lost
his red headed wife and he’s run
in the Boston Marathon. I say
I’ve finished my dissertation.
Looking me over, he adds that I ought
to take up Serious Running.
(He still speaks in all caps
like a Poly-Sci major.)
Am I in such bad shape? I laugh,
feeling my breath sag
under the weight of a box
of schoolbooks—the shelves
in my ex-office bare.
He says he’s found it Good Karma
to run out the Ends of Relationships.
Is that what I’ve had with the U—
an affair of the heart?
“You bet.” He opens the book on top:
“And the subject is?”
Tragic Irony. Then I laugh.
“At least you don’t moan,” he says,
taking my burden up,
my Renaissance texts.
At least I don’t moan.
Tom tells me the field
is Wide Open to Women.
“And you know their Endurance.
Except for my wife.” He shrugs wryly
and bumps my hip with his own.
“You’re built for it.
But you have to start
slowly at first, or Dump Toxins
into your blood stream.”
No cramming, you mean?
No all-nighters under the thumb
of one’s thesis-director?
“Just Straight-forward Faith.”
He tells me how last year in Boston
a woman who suffered from diarrhea
came in stinking and brown and
wrapped in a towel and first.
She had run out all poisons.
I say I could do that.
As he lugs the crate to my car,
he pretends not to see how I lag
like a lover forsaken
by light-dappled rooms, smelling
of chalk-dust, by old ironies
in love poems, splendid and cruel,
and in notes from professors,
witty and scolding. Instead,
I skip a few steps to catch up
to this slightly-absurd, mocking man
and his: “Well, let’s go then.”
Giving in to the world coming on,
I find myself circling Green Lake
as I’ve seen him some mist-writhing
mornings, his soft wheeze as he comes
anguishing over the bike path, his hands
grabbing and flinging the air.
Battering the hours, I round
the last bend beside him, numbed,
grown-up, Equal to Any Distance,
my life lengthening before me.
Going to the Doctor’s
When I arrive to pick up my daughter
for her appointment, I see fairy dust
on every photo on her walls.
Filigree veils of it. It’s a haunted house
where specters stumble among the seven cats.
On the drive to the clinic, haze
smudges the San Jacinto Mountains.
In spite of ourselves we breathe deep
the lovely scent of brushfire.
In the waiting room we watch the Health Channel
where they tell us the most germ-ridden object
in our daily world is the cell phone.
They are stopping people on the street
and measuring the microbes—
thousands and thousands.
Second: computer keyboards; third: desktops
where, they say, people eat meals and never
wash up. I myself have gorp and dark chocolate
squirreled away in a desk cubbyhole.
On the way back, coming through the pass,
we look for flames, though it isn’t the season,
though nowadays it is always the season.
But the windshield’s stained by drizzle
or there are more bugs than ever
kamikazeing themselves on the windshield.
When I ask her what he said, she says
it was good because it made her feel
less like a baby. Later, I report to her older sister
who asks did he say “severe” or “advanced,”
and, not having an answer, I switch subjects.
Then she tells me she’s heard women’s purses
are the worst, sometimes even smeared
with invisible fecal matter.
“Public restrooms,” we sigh together,
where, she adds, if you can’t hang them up,
you should at least hold them
on your lap as you would a baby.
Bio
Frances Ruhlen McConnel is co-chair with Lucia Galloway of the Claremont Public Library's Poetry Reading Series. She is presently working on a series of poems for her younger brother, who died in February. Recently, a poem of hers appeared in the last issue of Salt River Review and a stanza from her poem "Chimera" (originally published in Poemeleon) opens Althea Hayton's anthology Womb Twin Survivers (from Wren Publications).