She Walks in Beauty_ A Woman's Journey Through Poems - Caroline Kennedy [28]
Just tear them to bits and go out for a walk.
It’s a small fraud by the world’s standard:
You can’t do things like ask for directions,
So you call yourself an adventure-collector.
Failure’s a field with real opportunities
For a girl with a pile of business magazines
Which she will probably have to burn for heat.
Your luck will get either worse or better.
The world is none of your business;
It doesn’t give you a living.
Someone calls your bluff, asks for references.
You read up on yourself in the library.
With lies, you can double your existence.
In an endless dream of introductory letters,
The applicants sit in all their best clothes,
Their ages against them, their loneliness
Repeated many times. The managers walk around, choosing.
You say you’ve done singing telegrams and balloon bouquets
(you’ve done strip-o-grams, sold flowers at traffic lights).
You’re a cake decorator, you’ve been to zoo school
(you’re a weeper-at-weddings, you eat cat food).
Welcome to the world of captivity.
You were calm yesterday, and today you’re thinking,
“In the days when I was calm.” You’d like
To talk about your sex life. Singing your salesman’s song,
You wave your thirteen letters “To Whom It May Concern,”
Every one a masterpiece.
Fooling a man is a full-time job.
You’ve had a good day? You’ve found something?
The world needs you right away.
The loneliness repeats itself.
You chart the progress of your fellow novices
Who stand around as astonished as slaves
Delivered in a day. They aren’t moving up,
But they’re saying “You bet.”
They call the boss The Enemy.
Whatever makes every beginning a sad one
Suggests that somewhere there is something else for you.
Your boss is a terrorist; you like him.
Reading the impressions on his note pad,
You can’t help certain hopes.
Sitting in the switchboard glow,
Connected by the movements of your hands and arms,
You’re a shaky presence among solid things.
You don’t get a glimpse of his heart of gold,
But you hear things he’d never tell anyone:
He spent his youth dreaming of being a thief;
He is where others ought to be;
People should be ashamed of their luck and proud of their trouble.
At noon you sneak out and eat a stale moon pie
From a filling-station jar. You take gloves to the tramps
Who stand around trash-can fires thanking God
They aren’t tramps. You shake their hands.
The job is impossible, but the enemy,
Meaning your heart, is calm.
That typewriter has not got his eyes or arms:
If you accept its offer, it won’t embrace you, yet it offers
Itself more than he does. It won’t mind
If you fall asleep in a rush at your desk
Repeating to yourself, “I am asleep,” or that
you can’t tell in this atmosphere
The difference between sweat and tears.
You know what all the world knows: time was invented
So workdays could come to a close.
The women on the electric train
Shift their weight in the direction of the men.
The men stare off, every one for himself,
Every departure a sad one.
You’re not the same person they regarded impatiently
Over the pencil sharpener: you’ve escaped.
You have to lean against the window frame and laugh.
Cherishing bits of evidence of how strange you are,
You pass through glowing rectangles of town and country.
You think of knights, town criers, jesters.
You can see the world in the last light
Laid out like a checkerboard, and you can live.
So you’re an agent, adjuster, accommodator
With a wish to take the movements of your arms elsewhere.
Have faith in your doubts.
Your vocation is to feel
Less despair about despair.
You’ll be there until you leave.
Defining Worlds
G. Y. BAXTER
Some would say I chose work
They don’t know—it may have chosen me
I’m a working mother
A woman named Sally
Takes care of my baby
Tiny and confused
I can’t stay to help
Happy, in fragments
Fleeting, stolen leisure . . .
That time we all paused
To celebrate
A broken BlackBerry
And hectic mornings
And sick days
And school plays
And school’s out
And staying late
Running
Running between two worlds