Poor Dolores

Dolores wears her melancholy well.
It drapes in languid folds along the lines
of her long thighs, a satin black expanse,
an extravagant expense of sulks and sighs.
Each tear becomes a diamond as it dries.

Each man who meets her longs to lie beneath
the weeping willows of her hair, and hopes
to glimpse the woodland nymph that crouches there.
Shadows tremble in her collarbones
like shallow cups of sorrow, sweet and rare.

          Other women weep and no one cares;
          their ugly snuffles only irritate.
          When funerals and tumors slow them down
          their bosses yell at them for being late.
          They stand in stalls and flush to hide their cries.

Dolores, though, is differently configured.
Around her hanging head, white butterflies
flutter in a sympathetic halo.
Of all the maids that mourn with heaving breast,
poor, poor Dolores does it best.

Artist’s Statement

I wish I could claim to be one of those fiercely independent types, like Kay Ryan, who can’t understand why anyone would want to workshop a poem. The truth is, I would never even have attempted to write poetry if I hadn’t accidentally wandered into an online workshop and found people actually working on their poems. (I had always thought of poetry as something that flowed effortlessly from the pens of suave, skinny, intimidating people.)  Since then I’ve workshopped many poems, and usually the feedback has been helpful.

This one marked a turning point for me. It got mixed reactions in the workshop: many readers didn’t get it, and I found myself disagreeing with much of the criticism. Later it was rejected by several editors before eventually being accepted by Atlanta Review. Along the way I almost gave up on it, not because I didn’t like it, but because it hadn’t been lavished with praise. Workshops had taught me the value of taking criticism with an open mind. The next lesson was that I had to grow a spine. Ultimately, the critic I had to please was myself, not some reader in a workshop or the editor of some magazine. I still have certain invertebrate tendencies, such as unconsciously liking my poems better once they’ve been accepted for publication, but the latest X-rays show something vaguely spinelike beginning to take shape.