March 2018
Robert Wexelblatt
wexelblatt@verizon.net
Note: Mrs. Podolski is an imaginary woman, a salty widow—but more an individual than a type.  I wrote a series of poems starring Mrs. Podolski in which I always pictured her speaking to a young woman. Here is the first pair.

Mrs. Podolski Explains How She Wants Me To Look At The World


If you concentrate, you may almost get 
it right, or at least not so wrong.  Stare at
that maple losing one leaf, the trashman’s
practiced heft and dump; nothing’s lovelier
than a young girl’s leg when it’s connected,
beauty being a disposition of 
parts, beauty being what we love because
we see it’s beautiful, beauty being 
that tautology before which you lose
all your logic; one must work yet never
strain to see it, it’s not exertion but
an opening; try to see like an old bitch 
sunk on her paws moving nothing but one
blood-shot eye, letting nothing in but light.



​
Mrs. Podolski Has Some Fun With My Future


While we were finishing the dishes
Mrs. Podolski began to talk
in that facetious way of hers
about what she calls “my wishes
for you, dear.”  In this fairy tale I walk
through a life Croesus couldn’t afford
sealed off from its chills by thick furs,
immunized, triumphant, and adored.

She doesn’t really mean it, doesn’t
want me to think she does; she’d despise
anyone like that even if it wasn’t
me but de Beauvoir or Curie, bent
under the weight of a Nobel prize,
fawned on by the Nordic King and Queen.
No, it wasn’t at all what she meant
but precisely what she didn’t mean.
“Mrs. Podolski Explains How She Wants Me To Look At The World” first appeared in The Plum Review
“Mrs. Podolski Has Some Fun With My Future” first appeared in The Carolina Quarterly
       © 2018 Robert Wexelblatt​
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