the writers' workshop: a fiftieth anniversary celebration || estrangement
TRANSCRIPT
EstrangementAuthor(s): Jane CooperSource: The Iowa Review, Vol. 16, No. 1, The Writers' Workshop: A Fiftieth AnniversaryCelebration (Winter, 1986), p. 50Published by: University of IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20156266 .
Accessed: 14/06/2014 19:53
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Estrangement Jane Cooper
You dream someone is leaving you, though he says kindly, It's not that you're cold
or After all you're
an affectionate person.
You can't explain how hard it is to explain or even to write this poem so you blurt, J was ashamed, they put me in the class for remedial speech.
The doctor leans forward: Do you feel you have failed me recently? The dream answers through you: J am locked in a struggle with the truth.
(I was ashamed, I couldn't speak, they voted me out of the shelter.
Like Rousseau's Sleeping Gypsy I lay exposed to the nuclear night till a dog found my throat.)
You watch your own back growing smaller up the beach.
Class
Jacksonville 1934
How the shrimp fisherman's daughter did a handstand
against the schoolyard fence
proving she owned no drawers
just as my grandmother's old black Packard drove up like a hearse
How we dug in the woods for pirate gold and found only the bootleggers' empties
50
This content downloaded from 195.34.78.245 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 19:53:56 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions