The Poem

I owe this story to Lunanul’s brilliant debut piece, Becoming Whole. If you’re looking for hot, kinky sex, so am I, but you won’t find it in this story, so stop before you’re disappointed.

*

I was a gopher on the college literary magazine my sophomore year. Then I had more hair, much less fat, many fewer wrinkles, and wanted to be a writer. One or two of the contributors actually did get published, one more than once. For me, that particular dream died with a lot of others.

I got to read the poems as they came in, sitting in the airless, windowless room allotted to us in a 1930s, wannabe Gothic, PWA building in our public (but cheap) college. They were all written on paper; would you believe the whole entire college had only one computer, an IBM 7 series the size of a walk-in refrigerator. Most of the poems showed promise, most as firestarters for barbecue charcoal, but we had to print a few. Yes, I was an arrogant puppy in those days.

Then there was one; it stopped me. I remember the beginning so well:

As I lie with you

I go to glory

I go to glory

When I lie with you

And the white owl

One ear cocked to the ceiling

One liquid eye floating in the goblet

Upward.

I remember I shivered. I could feel the poet's arousal, imagine her (I knew it had to be "her" even before I looked at the signature) opening her legs, waiting for the thrust (or better still, the gentle insertion and pressure), tensing, relaxing, waiting for the rush of glory. God, I hoped he was good, a good man, a great fuck; she deserved the best. And if she got tired of him, I was prepared to volunteer on the spot.

Then I read the name: Glynnis Trondheim. Didn't know her, but then her year was two ahead of mine. She'd be graduating the next June.

Someone walked into our cave just then. I looked up and asked whoever it was "Do you know this Glynnis Trondheim? She has a really great poem here." I remember a grunt in reply (the person outranked me, but so did everybody else), to acknowledge that an insignificant being had spoken.

The he or she (who remembers?) said something like "Yeah, she's an English major, Dean's List, I was in a Shakespeare class with her last year."

"Does she ever come around here?" I asked. Yes, I was a puppy indeed.

"She can't get in here."

"Why not?"

"Her wheelchair won't fit in the elevator."

Of course, this was in the ghastly pre-Americans With Disabilities Act days, when disabled people were meant neither to be seen nor heard. The rest of us were all hot for desegregation and racial equality (I had friends who Freedom Rode, and we all went to all the appropriate demonstrations), but no one thought about gays, Lesbians, or disabled people, except other gays, Lesbians and disabled persons. It would have been a novel thought to the 19-year old puppy that things should be otherwise.

"Oh," I said.

I had written one story that had gotten me second prize in a contest sponsored by the big private university in our city. It meant a half-scholarship, but the other half, all of $800, would have been to my widowed mother with three children and her aged mother to support, like three million dollars would be to me today.

I wrote another story that I submitted to the magazine. Apparently Glynnis was one of the readers, and said she liked it. I don't remember it; it might have been passable. I liked to write then.

So I got to meet her over coffee in the Union. I was anticipating something very special.

She was a shrunken, elfish little girl. Her bright, happy face was like an angel in a Renaissance manuscript. I looked away from the skirt that fell limply over her wasted legs. Her arms were thin but strong. She seemed at one with the wheelchair, as if they had been friends for many years. Her long thin blond hair was brushed but untended, and she ignored makeup.

I shook her hand, expecting the strong grip of one whose life was in her hands. The strength and delicacy surprised me.

"I very much admired The Owl's Story," I began.

"Thank you," she replied, "I really care about that poem."

"I could tell," I said, and looked at the floor.

"Your story about the printer in the printshop and the gymnast on television was very real to me. I do watch television whenever I can find something good." Obviously she didn't get out much in the evenings, I thought; I was a stupid bastard as well as arrogant in those days. Well, maybe some things never change.

I said, "I try to write what I feel, but mostly it doesn't come out right. Either it's stilted or it's incomprehensible to anyone but me."

"I know," she said, "there are some things you can't say and be understood."

What I wanted to say was I love you, I want to fuck you, I want us to go to glory together in one gigantic burst of light, I want to pick you up and carry you to Heaven where you belong. But, though that would be easy to understand, it would also be a top-fuel Class A conversation-stopper. So I said, "Can I get you another cup of coffee?"

I was prepared to blow a large part of my five-dollar weekly pocket money there and then. It would be better than spending the 45 cents on another pack of L&M Filters (and if you're old enough for any of this to make sense to you, my condolences. If it doesn't make sense, congratulations, but settle down--you have a long way to go).

"No, this is fine", she said, which today would translate to "yes I would, but how do I get to a ladies' room anywhere in this building or on this campus that is accessible to someone like me? So no, even though I would love another cup."

We talked a while longer.

Our non-relationship interaction went on into the Spring. I finally got to visit her at her parents' apartment, in one of the grand downtown buildings miles away, and light years removed, from the crowded two-bedroom flat where all five of our family lived. I had the excuse of delivering printer's proofs for review. She had been elected editor for the final issue of the magazine for her senior year.

Her room was light and friendly, with low shelves and nothing that she could not reach from her wheelchair, with lowered lightswitches and counterweighted windows for easy opening. It was novel then, and must have cost her parents enough to keep our family fed for months.

If you hadn't guessed, I hated being poor.

She smiled as she re-read The White Owl. She looked up and said "It's a lovely poem. I read it again and again."

"It's magnificent," I said. I looked at her bed, narrow, with no posts or headboard, nothing to keep her from easy access unaided. I wanted to put her on that bed and act out The White Owl. I wanted many things then; it took me years to get a few, but Glynnis wasn't one of them.

"My inspiration is coming over soon. Please stay and meet him."

I looked away, as I didn't want her to see my face. A gun? An axe? A castrating knife? Picture wire? My bare hands? The son of a bitch bastard, he's going to fuck her. I want to kill him.

Then, in that same fraction of a second, sanity returned, and I replied, "Of course, it's so kind of you to ask me to stay, I don't want to intrude----."

A few minutes later the front door opened (I could hear the bell and the murmured greeting to Mrs. Trondheim) and in strode a tall, heavy-set man, much older than I (and he could have killed me, rather than vice versa, so I subsided and played the eager sophomore, a role I was good at).

"Oh Woodsy," She said. Gentle Christ our Saviour, I thought, Woodsy? They are joking, aren't they?

Apparently not. "Hi, Glyn my angel."

I don't remember the conversation, except it was short and inane. Woodsy had graduated from Harvard and was a TA at a neighboring public college. We played the old "who can trump whose epigram", which I won with "St Paul is to Jesus as Lenin is to Marx," which Woodsy thought the height of originality (and for once, I don't think I stole that line from anybody).

I said goodbye and shook hands. It was a rainy spring afternoon and the trip home was lonelier and longer than I had ever remembered.

Glynnis Trondheim graduated with honors. I never saw her again. I had almost forgotten her, stored her away with a lot of broken and useless stuff, until I read Lunanul's story.

Now I remember, and I have to remember what I don't want to remember.