Rejected by Marge, but…

Years ago, I applied to a week-long poetry workshop that Marge Piercy was giving at the Omega Institute. I like to think that I applied too late, but the truth is that I wasn’t accepted. But I still am a big Piercy fan. Here’s an example of why:
Flying over the Nebraska of my life
Marge Piercy, Colors Passing Through Us, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
So much of our lives dissolves.
What did I do the day before
I met you? You remember
what I was wearing that holiday.
What did I wear the next morning?
What did I write the day my mother died?
I fly at night over the plains.
There is a cluster of lights,
a starfish shape glittering. Then
darkness and darkness.
Then another clump bearing
long daisy petals of roadway.
Then nothing again. How much
of my living has fled like water
into sand. The sand is not
even damp to the hand.
Tears and wine and sparkling
water all vanish the same.
I know looking out the plane’s
dirty window that there are houses,
barns, roads, trees, stores
distinct in that darkness I once
drove through. I knew them and will
never know them again.
The plane is flying from lighted
place to lighted place, but
our arc is from the dark into
brightness then back into darkness.
I want to possess my own life like a
necklace, pearl by pearl of light.

And I also really liked her future-world novel He, She, It, even though I’m in the vast minority on that.

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