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 R. G. Evans serve as the Mad Poet of the Year for 2022.
Woman Dressed as Death
by R.G. Evans
One liked to pull shadows close around her shoulders like a shawl.
Young, pretty. Not too thin, not too pale. You can call me anytime,
she’d say. I’m always here in town. He treated her kindly as if she were the one.
He kissed the one from Georgia, long and open-mouthed.
Shouldn’t flirt, he knew, but he’d been too long alone, and her smell, my god, her smell . . .
Her tongue tasted of lingonberry. She had to go work the third shift.
The one in Aruba surprised him. To recognize her at all seemed too strange.
The just-there bikini and the tawny, languid tan. They sipped rum drinks
and envied the sun its brilliance, the few hours of it they had left together.
Brooklyn. Seattle. Santa Fe. At least one in every city. And sometimes,
Like Los Angeles, they circled him in droves, a chorus of black dresses,
whispers, and mascara. He touched them all—he couldn’t help himself.
At home, he spent nights dreaming of the one he’d not yet met.
Would he know her when she found him? Would she smell like smoke
and mirrors like the ones who weren’t real? His dreams held out white fingers
and he took them in his hands. He recognized the place they walked as somewhere
he once loved. A little creek. A sandy bank. The distant sound of trains.
He gave her hand a little squeeze and turned in her direction, the way he’d always done.
Gentle reader, a favor. Please read this poem before you read the comments below. I wonder how it will read differently before and after you know of the poem’s origin. Read it first cold. I’ll wait.
This poem from my first book, Overtipping the Ferryman, originated from a line from a New Yorker profile of Neil Gaiman from many years ago in which the writer, referencing a character from Gaiman’s Sandman comics, wrote, “Women dressed as Death are everywhere he goes.” I’ve never read the Sandman series, but I did watch the Netflix adaptation—the timely reason I’m sharing this poem here--with great relish.
Once at the Dodge Poetry Festival, the poet Donald Hall signed one of his books for me and turned to one of the poems and manually edited it with a Sharpie, saying the editors had ruined it in publication. I feel tempted to do the same with the ending of this poem which feels little flat, but I’ll leave it alone for now. I don’t want to tempt fate and risk a visit from a familiar woman in unfamiliar clothes.
R.G. Evans’s books include Overtipping the Ferryman (Aldrich Poetry Press Prize), The Holy Both, and Imagine Sisyphus Happy. His original songs were featured in the poetry documentaries All That Lies Between Us and Unburying Malcolm Miller, and his collection of original songs, Sweet Old Life, is available on most streaming platforms. Evans teaches creative writing at Rowan University. Website: www.rgevanswriter.com