Joan Bauer is the author of The Almost Sound of Drowning (Main Street Rag, 2008). Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals including 5 AM, Pearl, Quarterly West, Slipstream, and US 1 Worksheets, and in over a dozen anthologies, among them, Along These Rivers: Poetry and Photography from Pittsburgh, Come Together: Imagine Peace, and Only the Sea Keeps: Poetry of the Tsunami, which she co-edited with Judith Robinson and Sankar Roy in 2005. Her poetry has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and in 2007, her poem “Sleepers,” won the Earl Birney Poetry Prize from Prism International. For some years, Joan worked as an English teacher and educational counselor and now divides her time between Venice, CA and Pittsburgh, PA where she co-hosts and curates the Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series. For more on the series, go to: www.hemingwayspoetryseries.blogspot.com
Blind
Date
I
drive all the way to
for
a blind date with a Chekhov scholar.
The
tremor in his hands,
the
way his sugar rises as he eats
three
carrots. His
soft-yolk eyes
dancing
helplessly.
In
the ladies’ room,
blink
at the uncertain woman
in
the mirror, wonder
If you’re free to do whatever you want,
why are you doing this?
Back
with the diabetic Russian,
distract
myself thinking how
sometimes
in life (as in Chekhov)
nothing
happens.
Then
wonder, what’s this poor guy thinking
and
whom might I remind him of—
Madame
Ranevsky,
the
profligate widow.
Varya,
almost a nun.
Anya
the idealist,
soul-starved,
grasping whatever poison
is
pushed her way—
All
of them at once?
Just
then he stops pushing carrots
around
his plate, says to me:
In Chekhov, the pain is unbearable.
-Joan
E. Bauer
from
The Almost Sound of Drowning (Main
Street Rag, 2008)
Joan E. Bauer was a Featured Poet who read her poetry at the February 2014 Second Sunday Poetry Series