February 2019
Kate Sontag
sontagk@ripon.edu
sontagk@ripon.edu
After 22 years of teaching in the prairies of Wisconsin, I now live in the Berkshires with my husband and two spaniels where I'm grateful for mountain views and swims in as many lakes as possible once the ice thaws and before it returns. I am co-editor (with David Graham) of After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography (Graywolf), and I'm published widely in journals and anthologies. My most recent work appears in Villanelles (Everyman's Library), Cooking With The Muse (Tupelo), SoFloPoJo, and One. I have a pantoum forthcoming in Raintown Review and I'm editing an anthology of poems about hair.
Recognition Scene
You’d recognize that bulky blue coat anywhere—
embroidered black frog closures
sewn on by your own hands for a more decorative
look over a decade ago--gathering
spaniel hair along the hem in your downstairs
closet, saved for sentiment or cold weather
emergencies. You want to apologize to its wearer, pushing
her grocery cart past the dairy section,
for the tiny hole in the left pocket revealing a wintery
tuft of polyester fill, the linty purple socks you threw
last minute into the duffle along with wrinkled flannel
shirts and a pilled bathrobe long overdue for Goodwill.
A friend down the road mentioned the woman who
survived the fire was your height but rounder, that she
hoped her clothes were salvageable but to leave
donations with her neighbor just in case. Having
dreamt this encounter dozens of times, you’d like to introduce
yourself, ask if there’s a microwave and fridge in
the motel where she’s camped out indefinitely, tell her
how you know the reek of smoke lingers and can
never be fully soaked clean. But you find yourself speechless,
feel again the familiar fabric of guilt hoarding up
inside you when you almost didn’t give up the coat, had to think
twice since your sister had helped you pick it out
when it was new and expensive. This is a coat
you’ll never regret owning your sister had said,
in part because it was reversible. It’s reversible
you would point out to this woman just in case
she hadn’t noticed, but you don’t say anything,
regrettable or otherwise, recalling only the dark
clouds you first thought might be a snow squall
headed for the prairie as you walked your
dogs at dusk in this very same ankle-length
coat, then the curdling sound of ambulances
and fire trucks, the sky suddenly aflame in the west.
Instead of forcing names to faces
you shy away from this small town moment of truth,
your lips shut like the hooks and eyes
you reinforced along the seams to keep them from
prying loose, choose anonymity and head for
produce, hoping to avoid another chilly scene with
the manager about rotting lettuce, look forward
to clementines filling the black ceramic bowl
your stepdaughter sent you for Chanukah.
Outside, snow falls so relentlessly you imagine
the irreversible black skeleton of this woman’s
house burned beyond recognition transformed
into a permanent white burial mound for her
cherished possessions while she strolls these
fluorescent aisles of Pick’n Save in your
designer faux down hand-me-down. For all
you know she might be your gregarious
doppelganger if only you’d offer her a chance
to find you, reaffirm how lightweight the long
parka is despite its warmth and volume, lost as she is now
among the canned fruit, barely recognizable
to even herself in someone else’s clothing.
When the two of you walk back out into
the blizzard-bright parking lot, you will each take forever
to find and brush off your cold cars, drive
carefully in different directions, separate but
synonymous through the icy ashes of winter, still
strangers carrying varying degrees of loss on your shoulders,
trying not to miss the right turnoff toward home.
© 2019 Kate Sontag
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