Arthur, thanks for the great nite of poetry! / Poem: Hoedown at the Landfill

Our featured reader was Miriam Kotzin of the long braids and bad back. I can relate, I said to her afterward, holding my tushion (tush cushion when I went up to buy one of her many books.

Always have the author inscribe it. And then eat your heart out about the hundred or so poems you've written which would look lovely bound within a nice shiny cover.

Instead of meeting in our usual spot, the Community Room of the Elkins Park Library, we met in the Children's Room.

So much better! Airy, no closed doors.

Our host, Arthur, thanked me for making the trip again. I'd shown up erroneously last week. Of course I'd return. I couldn't wait to be reunited with our large poetry community.

Who would be there?

Sitting one over was Sister Mary Annette, who's an occupational therapist (!!!) at Moss Rehab. Attired in street clothes, she said she goes "undercover" as a therapist. They don't need to get involved with all that, she said.

I asked if this was her first time reading here, which it was. She wrote a poem about her sister who was just diagnosed with cancer.

Live in the moment, exhorted Mary Annette. Eat ice cream!

Most of us read two poems, since we had 17 readers after the featured poet.

Ken Schmolze of Fishtown always comes to listen. He shook hands with the guys. One time, many years ago, Kenny and I were on the phone for five hours. I wrote a piece about our talk, which, if it pleases the Lord, he will allow me to find.

Now Ken and I never ever talk, only to say hello.

One reader was better than the next. Three high school students from Cheltenham High had read in a poetry slam last week and repeated their dramatic performances for us.

Shirley Edelman spoke for all of us when she read a tribute poem to our Arthur! Glancing over at Arturo, I saw this amazing look on his face. He looked like he was having an angina attack.

His daughter, Judy, one of three girls and the only one that lives in town, was dabbing her eyes. How nice for her to see her father honored.

We love your dad, I mouthed to her.

Judy looked a bit like my friend Amy Russell. At first, I did think it was Amy and couldn't imagine why she was here.



Audrey Bookspan is such an old favorite you know she's gonna come up with something good, which is why the woman next to me pulled out her camera phone and clicked away.

Irresistible!

Audrey, who was one of the Martha Graham dancers, now walks with a cane but is surely one of the most beautiful and elegant of women, with huge round dangling earrings and a lovely trim body.

Today, she announced, is National Tap Dance Day.



Sure enough, she plopped a pair of tap shoes on the podium, and read one poem complaining about getting old, and another about what to do about it.

You dance! She asked us to tap along with her as she sang her poem to the tune of Making Whoopee.

A true delight. She teaches tap dancing.

And then there was Mike Cohen, sitting next to girlfriend Connie, and Steve Delia.

No one reads like Mike, gesturing and bending and cracking jokes in his poems. Very clever man.

He and Delia both will enliven my first open mic on Friday June 12 at Weinrich's Bakery and Coffeeshop in Willow Grove.

I had to get home fast to take my antirejection pills, half an hour late, but it's okay.

When it was my turn to read, I said, My poem will answer the question on my T-shirt - Ask me Why I've Got Three Kidneys.

And then I read my new one: Hoedown at the Landfill. I'll dedicate it to Bill Hess, but only if he likes it.

Ya know what? I haven't the courage to re-read it.

What does that mean?

HOEDOWN AT THE LANDFILL

orange peels - eggshells - purple rubber bands
blood-soaked bandaids - stinkbugs in napkins
certainly
i shall miss you
plop you
with a thud
in the garbage can
the truck will pick you up tomorrow
grind you to bits while i sleep
unlike father and brother whose bodies
decompose with the worms and the grubs
you shall live forever
vying for superiority in the landfill
will you come alive?
will you pull apart and swarm with the microbes
who love you so
o dwellers of the underground
never to sit atop my table or adorn my arm or
staunch my blood
let orpheus sing his song for you
and christ set you free on judgment day.