No one ever talked to her, or knew her name—
the woman who came to poetry readings
Monday nights at The Blacksmith House.
She took her usual seat—first row aisle,
placing her raincoat on a folding chair
under her Filenes shopping bag and purse,
putting space between herself and us locals
who filed in, greeting noisily, extravagantly,
the famous, newly published, the wannabes.
Bag lady long before the crop of homeless
invaded Harvard Square, in winter
she'd come inside the building to get warm,
wearing her dowdy tan cardigan and London Fog.
In the spring, when it started warming up,
she'd still be dressed in the same outfit.
She could have been forty-five, or sixty,
someone's dotty aunt or cousin; crazy, but
not sick enough to cart off and lock away.
But she wasn't harming anyone; why, she'd
probably single-handedly attended
more readings at the Blacksmith than any
other poet in the room! At eight-fifteen,
Gail Mazur stepped up to the podium
and welcomed tonight's poet who sat
humbly in his chair, as once again he heard
that he had graduated from Dartmouth,
heard the year he'd published his first prize-
winning volume, congratulating himself
as Gail unscrolled his honors, grants he'd won,
the famous story about his conversation with X.
The audience clapped politely, the Poet mounted
the stage, blew Gail a kiss, then got down\
to business. Halfway through his program,
as he was reading his most-requested poem,
his eyes awash with tears, his manly voice
about to rise and break on the pungent iambs
of his father's dying words—as if on cue,
but purely randomly, you understand,
the Yawner took a big deep breath
and yawned out loud a half-yawn half-groan,
then vented three very long very audible sighs
loud enough to be heard in the last row
thirty rows back—a sound not to be mistaken
for a gasp of someone moved profoundly,
no, not to be confused with anything but a yawn
and all that a yawn like that implied.
No stranger to interruptions—rude whispers,
sneezes, coughing fits, the emergency trip
to the john, or people just plain walking out—
the Poet pretended he didn't hear what he'd
so clearly heard, and we, in turn, pretended
to ignore it, too, because we knew the Yawner
yawned only one yawn per reading. The Poet
blinked, picking up where he'd left off, but you
could see it took him down a peg or two.
Chastened, he resumed reading his poems,
never quite recovering his former equilibrium.
Week after week, we regulars knew what to expect.
The Yawner yawned at Joseph Brodsky.
She yawned at Phil Levine.
She yawned at Robert Lowell and Derek Walcott.
She yawned at fledglings, she yawned at pros.
She yawned when the sobbing Lady-Poet read
her entire book of sonnets in one sitting.
She yawned at East and West Coast poets,
at nature poets, urban poets, traditional, surreal,
she yawned and yawned at L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poets,
she yawned at poets in sequined jeans clutching
the microphone like rock stars, she yawned
at their marital tragedies, a big ho hum,
she yawned at their funny Southern accents,
silly Boston accents, their Eastern-European-
tinged-English though they'd grown up in Philly,
she yawned at their haikus, tankas, sestinas,
their clumsy terza rimas, she yawned at their
breasts, their buttocks, their prostate glands,
she yawned while they tossed their wild hair,
she yawned while their throats got dry and raspy
and they stopped reading and slowly poured
a glass of ice water from the sweating pitcher
without spilling a drop and gulped it down,
she yawned at all the American poetry written
in the nineteen seventies and eighties,
and at all poetry written in translation, too,
she yawned her yawn, oblivious to the shock waves
spreading concentric rings around the epicenter
of her yawn, her epic yawn, her fabulous yawn,
and she'll yawn until the last word of the last poem
is written, and applause breaks out and wakes us all.
-- Jane Shore
The poem was first published in Poets of the New Century (David R. Godine,1999)
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