Jamail Center for Legal Research
Tarlton Law Library

Maybe She Was Following

Too easy to say it's the story
    of my life. Three weddings, four or five
         "careers"-- now I know: Eurydice
had fish to fry. What's not my story:
    Orpheus, Bard-About-to-Marry
    when his woman died. He came on
singing, sighing, to The Underworld,
    teased them to half-yield-up his almost-bride.
         One glance back at her--and she was
gone again. But nothing kept him from
    keeping up his poetry till wild
         ravishing females took him apart.
His head kept calling. Water flowed. What
    we have about Eurydice is:
         maybe a snake bit her on the way
to the wedding. She vanished. Later
    maybe--maybe--she was following
         The Poet/her almost-husband back.

Maybe. She fell out of story. E.
    turns up blank. Her career we read from
         silences. Did she plant the snake or
the story about the snake? (In myth
    don't snakes mean consciousness?) Probably
         she spread gifts around where she fled to
from that wedding. Found a women's house,
    a writers' rest, who knows. Begged them: Make
         conditions. Warn him: DON'T LOOK BACK!
When he checks out what he owns, I'm free.
    All these years, weddings, lives--the books, the
         bodies littered on the trail--I've failed
to read her absence. Was she lonely
    at times? Write off Lost Love. Eurydice
         had work of her own to do.

In the Easy Dream

you're standing in the Court, all nine Supremes
in your face, before you notice your nightgown
flapping at your ankles when you stamp
a bare foot on the Fourth Amendment (Searches
and Seizures) point. It's the flannel one your
mother sent two marriages back: small purple
and orange flowers; high neck. Decent if
you keep it buttoned. Not what you mean to
argue in. Wrist elastic rides up if
you wave your arm. You tend to wave your arm.

Simple, they say: You're not ready for this.
You don't say when you work at home like this
you turn into WonderCounselor, the only
presto-litigator who can hold the line.
They'll overturn us back to coat hangers.

In the other dream that hangs on like shame
from the time you waltzed in front of strangers
oblivious while blood spread across the back
of your pearl-gray skirt, the love of your life
turns away from you a face you never see
at meals or on the pillow when he's asleep
and you're still reading: a face hard as death.
Whatever you have on, you can't give him
an argument--you, all words. Every time,
you wake weeping. Simpleton. You're not ready.

Situatedness

What else fades the way that cry left no trace in the air?
Scrambling downstairs in scuffs I kept losing until the
landing where a shape bulked out from shadow, I hailed that
Older Poet. No trouble RAISING MY VOICE this once--:
"You've filled this plane with dynamite!" Loud! Dreamy with
 Envy: of those women who wove together who wove
themselves together for a picture (limbs, clothes, hair
mingled like their wools). And breathless with Anxiety:
the new, rainforest-settlements-conglomerating-
under-pressure kind (in nanoseconds they turn into re-
source-extraction industries!)!
                                              Turn again.
                                                                My shtick is
shortfall. Figure there's gender at the center: this woman
who understands speech with the words pronounced backwards--but
wouldn't some guy have to speak it all backwards for her
to turn it around like a failing family business? I
want to mess up wildly, loudly. Why end up one more
female whose Mistakes were all men. Just: BE the potter.
Gray cap over long gray hair, bottle-green jacket,
ultramarine! cut-offs raggy at the knees and filthy
laceless blobbed men's trainers slopping off my bodacious
feet. Elbows out! Shoulders up! Hunch hard to jam face at
pot on wheel. Snarl at the clay.

Susan Holahan was born in New Jersey and grew up on Long Island, New York. She received her Ph.D. in English and her J.D. from Yale University. She taught creative writing at Yale College to pay law school tuition and daycare. Briefly, she worked at New Haven Legal Assistance and from the late '70s through the early '90s worked as a journalist in New York and Connecticut. In the mid-'90s she taught writing at the University of Rochester. Currently, Holahan writes poetry, essays, reviews--and edits the poetry, fiction, and nonfiction of friends and relatives--and lives in rural Vermont.
Holahan's collection of poems, Sister Betty Reads the Whole You (Gibbs Smith/Peregrine Smith Book, 1998) was winner of the 1997 Peregrine Smith Poetry Competition. Her poetry has appeared in Agni, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, Women's Review of Books, and Seneca Review and has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
"Maybe She Was Following" and "In the Easy Dream" are drawn from Holahan's first collection of poems, Sister Betty Reads the Whole You (Gibbs Smith/Peregrine Smith Book, 1998). "Maybe She Was Following" was first published in Spoon River Poetry Review, "In the Easy Dream" first appeared in The Plum Review.