November 2024
Bio Note: My new poetry collection, Steady, is out from Dos Madres Press, and it includes my prize-winning poems, “Lady Bird” and “Being Ruth Asawa.” My Ethel Zine chapbooks—Surrealist Muse, Escaping Lee Miller, Frida, and Being Ruth Asawa—are for sale in the gift shop of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
The Composer
for John Kander
Music plays in my head,
and I listen. Sounds and rhythms,
echoes and vibrations.
This is how I move through space,
how I comprehend my world.
Long, long ago,
when I was a baby in Kansas City,
I caught tuberculosis.
In those days, there was no cure.
Isolated on a sleeping porch,
I learned to match the sounds
of approaching footsteps
with the ones who made them.
But footsteps go both ways.
A residue of loneliness
lingers after all these years.
Music is the antidote.
The Paleoanthropologist
for Donald C. Johanson
Out of the corner of my eye
I caught the white glint
of a fossilized bone
lying in the dirt.
On closer inspection,
I recognized it as homonid.
This was in 1974,
in the Afar desert in Ethiopia.
I was thirty years old,
an associate professor
at Case Western Reserve
out on a field study.
My parents were immigrants.
My father died when I was two.
My mother cleaned houses to support us.
I scored poorly on the SAT
and was told to forget about college,
but I’d found a subject I loved
and mentors who encouraged me.
At thirteen I’d read
Thomas Huxley’s prediction
that someday someone would find
an ape more humanlike
or a man more apelike.
I recovered enough
of the skeleton to know
she was female and walked upright.
Her pelvis and leg bones resembled ours,
she stood three-and-a-half feet high,
her face was ape-like,
she had small canine teeth,
and her brain was the size
of an orange. She was more
than three million years old.
I named her Lucy after the Beatles song.
Her species, Australopithecus afarensis,
survived over a million years.
After our first discovery,
we spent long hot mornings
in the Land Rover,
mapping and surveying for fossils.
One day, I took an alternate route
back to camp through a gully.
Within minutes I spotted
a right proximal ulna
and identified it as hominid.
Next I saw an occipital bone,
a femur, some ribs,
a pelvis, and a lower jaw.
Two weeks later, we’d recovered
forty percent of a single skeleton.
To make the discovery
is only the first step.
Next is to interpret the evidence
in its geographic setting
and in the time scale
of human evolution.
It takes the dedicated effort
of a spectrum of specialists.
To us, Lucy was more than
dry old bones excavated from
a remote part of the world.
It was as if we could see
inklings of a personality.
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