This is Michael Carey for Voices from the Prairie a weekly sampling from the rich soil of Iowa’s literary tradition. Today’s poem is "Vivian at Eighty-six." It speaks of the repressed pain and bitterness that one day might burst forth if one persists in leading an inauthentic life, in always trying to do what others consider the "right thing" and not being true to oneself.
"I’ve been polite for eighty-six
years,"
Vivian chirps in her cracked voice.
"Now I’m cutting loose."
When Marvin Schneider
pushes ahead of her
at the grocery check-out line, she tells him
he’s bad tempered, has bad breath,
and that she remembers when he was in first grade
and peed his pants every day.
When her daughter sends the Lutheran
minister
to see her, she tells him to go to hell,
which flusters him considerably.
She writes letters to all her old
bosses,
insists on taking them to the cemetery
putting them on their graves. I tell her
dead men can’t read but she says her words
will sink right through the dirt,
through their coffins, burn into their eyes,
the old dunderheads, the old pricks.
She sits on the balcony railing at
Priscilla’s
dangles her frail legs over the side and says
she can fly but that she won’t do it
while we’re looking. Oh, Vivian,
grasp the rigging of reality, sail back
to Spirit Lake if you can. It’s okay
to say that you would never have married Archie
except that you were pregnant,
didn’t grieve when he died
forty years later, that you lied
about your age, died your hair,
took too many tranquilizers.
It’s okay to call Herbert Fossback an old fart.
"Vivian at Eighty-six" by Ann Struthers. This reading is its first publication.
For Voices from the Prairie and Humanities Iowa, this is Michael Carey hoping you continue to hear the music blooming all around you.
Biography
Ann Struthers was born and grew up on a farm in Northwest Iowa. Her most recent adventures came about as a result of a Fulbright Fellowship to the Middle East where she was a professor of American literature at the University of Aleppo, in Syria. For years Ann was the poetry editor for the Des Moines Register. She has two books of poetry Stone Boat published in 1988 by Pterodactyl Press and The Alcott Family Arrives published in 1993 by the Coe Review Press. Currently she is writer-in-residence at Coe College in Cedar Rapids.