Poems Live On | Ellen Goldsmith
Something happy happened for me on January 16 th this year. An email from a friend and fellow poet congratulated on me on my poem featured in George Bilgere’s Poetry Town. I was already a fan of Bilgere’s poems but didn’t know about Poetry Town. Clicking the link, I found “The Secret of Life.” This poem appeared in my second chapbook, Such Distances, in 2009 and was read on The Writer’s Almanac on May 10, 2010.
And here it is again.
The Secret of Life
I grabbed the streetcar from Fisherman’s Wharf
to the Ferry Building to save my feet for later.
My dollar bill, wrinkled and worn, resisted disappearing
into the slot. I stuffed the transfer
in my pocket without looking.
As the streetcar rounded the Embarcadero,
I called my mother-in-law with mother’s day wishes,
imagined the conversation
I’d have with mine, were she alive.
On exiting, I asked the conductor
how long the transfer would last.
I gave you extra time, he said.
Just show it. Hardly anyone looks.
It’s good until it’s taken away.
As I read the poem all these years later, I’m brought back to those visits to San Francisco when I walked until my feet cried for relief. I think about my mother and my mother-in-law. Feelings and experiences return. Mostly I’m stuck by those remarkable moments when some everyday action or remark becomes large, when a transfer reveals the secret of life.
Pleasing to me was how this poem spoke to George Bilgere. He wrote:
My hope is that if I keep my head down, don’t draw attention to myself, and stay quiet about how old I’m getting,
the Great Conductor in the Sky just might fail to notice that my transfer is long expired.
I’m interested in how poems resurface, how poems resist expiration dates and how what’s in the poem grows and changes.
You probably have a line or phrase from a poem that returns to you. One of mine is from Auden’s Musee des Beaux Arts.” About suffering they were never wrong. I incorporate that line in a prose poem the appears in my recent collection Are We There Yet?
Out of the Shadows—
Like what happens when I stand before a painting, let’s say a seascape with a rosy sky and
gold-streaked clouds entitled “Broad Cove” and I can’t tell if it’s sunrise or sunset. I love
that. When the back story and the future don’t matter the way one line from an Auden
poem—About suffering they were never wrong—has an independent existence. And don’t you
think some melodies from symphonies have existed forever and Dvorak and Copland just
found them?
Returning to this poem, I think of the both constancy and the particularity of suffering. Also, by way of the title, I recognize one of poetry’s important gifts. Doesn’t both reading and writing poems bring what was in shadow into the light?
Ellen Goldsmith reads, writes and teaches poetry, all with equal enthusiasm. Are We There Yet? is her first full length collection, published by Kelsay Books. Her first book, a chapbook entitled No Pine Tree in This Forest Is Perfect won the Slapering Hol Chapbook Competition. Professor Emerita of the City University of New York, she lives in Cushing, Maine.
