The Mad Poet of the Year blog posts share the poetry of a long-time Mad Poet. This year-long appointment provides readers with a deep dive of the writer’s work and thoughts on poetry. We are thrilled to have Ray Greenblatt serve as the inaugural Mad Poet of the Year for 2021.
THE GAME OF PATIENCE
by Ray Greenblatt
Funny, I met him at a barn dance
didn’t say much
slit always-darting dark eyes
soft brown eyes
did say he wanted to be with people
who sank their roots deep
he moved well
especially graceful hands
I knew then that he used guns.
I used to be a hairdresser in a salon
now I tend only to my own hair
put it up in fantastic folderols
let it down like leaves
like feathers
mist from a waterfall,
I had all the children I wanted
when I had a school house,
I taught dancing too in a dance hall
now I whirl around the kitchen
in the arms of an invisible man
dust rising to outline his shape.
When he is relaxed in my bed at dawn
is my greatest happiness
his mustache
a vole twitching in my palm
his body firm and smooth
chest hair in shape of a cross
hard-calloused hands
hard-calloused buttocks
his voice low whisper like wind,
when a woman loves a man
--rare thing at that—
makes no difference what
he does to get by.
Garden patch out back
goat in the field
some Rhode Island Reds in a shed
tumbleweeds roll by
cottonwood limbs creak
crow’s morning alarm
owl’s night warning
down the lane my mailbox
beside it a sign: Etta’s Place
a letter is more holy
than the print in Scripture
I am the Red Queen learning to wait,
I mumble the chant
without being aware:
I listen to the Moon Sing
I watch the Sun Dance.
Paul Newman and Robert Redford are major actors in the history of American cinema. Their roles as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid especially endeared them to us. But I’ve been fascinated by the Kid’s girlfriend, Etta Place. Not many facts are known about this real person; the rest is hearsay. I wanted to create a back-story that gives dimensionality to this mysterious woman.
Ray Greenblatt has been a poet for forty years and an English teacher longer than that. He was an editor of General Eclectic, a board member of the Philadelphia Writers Conference, and is presently on the staff of the Schuylkill Valley Journal. He has won the Full Moon Poetry Contest, the Mad Poets Annual Contest, and twice won the Anthony Byrne Annual Contest for Irish Poetry sponsored by The Irish Edition. His poetry has been translated into Gaelic, Polish, Greek and Japanese.