Precious Little

“... the passageway down which they had just gone
was bright as the eye of a needle.”
—Eudora Welty, Losing Battles

So we’d gathered to talk about writing,
remembering great ones who’d recently gone
from our midst and the various ways
they had followed each voice through

the needle’s eye into the clearing of art,
when a novelist slouched
on the front row opined
that the only real subject is battle

and how men survive it.
I seethed while my student poets,
all of them women, sat waiting for someone
to challenge his vision of literature,

belligerent canon
where warring tribes battle it out
in their epics and blood-spattered novels.
“Miss Welty,” I countered, “stayed

clear of the battlefield, if you recall.
She sat down every day at the same desk
and made language raise the world up
from the grave of our common amnesia.”

He barely acknowledged
my comment. He wanted to flirt.
with my students. He shrugged at me,
stood up and showed off the fit

of his tight jeans. My god,
what a chasm he opened up right there
between us: we stared like combatants
across the trench, loading our weapons,

his now on full frontal display,
along with a first novel already lobbed
to reviewers by Random House. As for me,
middle-aged poet, what were mine?

Precious little. The shot I recalled
having seen months ago of a woman my age
holding up to the camera a photo of daughter
or sister or good friend who’d disappeared

into the rubble of felled towers, the same woman
I had seen sifting through ruins in Fallujah
or Kabul, even now cringing
when she hears the gunfire in Baghdad,

a woman who stares back at me
when I’m dusting my daughter’s face
framed on the shelf,
smiling out at a day that’s been gone

for so long I can barely remember it,
nothing much going on, no bombs,
no fireworks, just late summer afternoon
and the dogs asleep under the oak tree.