Solo — for Michael Wintering

Dear Michael:

I have written to you one hundred passionate love letters.
Your friends say my letters are kept unopened, 
thick in their envelopes, dated in order,
under the desk stuffed in a brown cardboard box.
But I know you carefully have read each one.

You are the muse who appears in my dreams:
dreams of discipline, improvisation, and song.
You who assumes the persona of companionship
When I am alone. You nestle within and fill my emptiness.

Dear Michael:

No matter how many journals I write 
always you emerge as my teacher, my mentor, my sensei.
And the inspired verse journal feeding my poems
Never grows weary of first lines, nor metaphor, nor image.
I have written you one hundred entreating love letters.
I speak of a personal and profound ache.
Alone without you I weep crystal tears.

Dear Michael:

Your eyes are moist with forgiving.
Face framed with silver-gray hair
encircling your face, a wreath of smoke and stars,
gleaming filaments of light.

.

My Father, My Muse: Cheyney, 1959

I sat in my father’s Freshman English class, the back row, Biddle Hall:
Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, Dickens became their college muses.
My father could inspire any innocent negro youth
to be a painter, a teacher, a poet, a master of sung verse.
He translates the name of Wordsworth to mean:
“the worth of words,” and I laugh at the simplicity of understanding.

Outside the tall windows, angry bees swarm above the rosebushes.
Chrysanthemums explode into autumn’s brilliant flame.

My father awoke in the common person some mysterious, childlike intelligence.
I loved to wander among the ancient volumes of his library:
Shakespeare, Moliere, Ibsen, the Greeks in translation.
I turned the pages of every book, a king’s ransom of wonders.

Dressed up in academic robe, the ribbons of scholarship decorating his sleeves,
he appears in my reveries as a man of pure faith, a man of God,
speaking the worth of proud words, a cadence of memory,
a legacy, the substance of our souls.

^^^

Beth Brown Preston is a poet and novelist with two collections of poetry from the Broadside Lotus Press and two chapbooks of poetry, including OXYGEN II (Moonstone Arts Center, 2022). She is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the MFA Writing Program of Goddard College. She has been a CBS Fellow in Writing at the University of Pennsylvania and a Bread Loaf Scholar. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in many literary and scholarly journals.

Image by Kalyee Srithnam.