From the Santa Cruz poet, novelist, translator and newspaper publisher, a tribute to the late great poet Maude Meehan.
Maude’s Poem
What a babe you are in those old photographs,
such a voluptuous girl whose eyes are alive
to the promise of desire, dawn of a great romance
written in real time forever with your one man.
Sixty years later suddenly he was gone.
It threw my pitiful suffering into relief,
blue as I was mourning the loss of a muse.
Your calls, over all those miles, lifted me up
when you said my pages gave you more pleasure
than The New Yorker afforded, and I smiled
at the end of the line, alone in my kitchen
above the ocean, nursing an absence
I didn’t know how to abandon,
grateful for such an impassioned ally.
We spoke of our respective solitudes,
yours so much more monumental than mine,
having lost the other with whom your entire
history was entwined; even the grandchildren
now were small consolation,
footnotes to a saga rooted in rhymed souls,
transcendent in its unending remembered
moments all but immortal.
Maude, you tough old broad,
even death couldn’t quite take you down—
you died sitting up, like a poker player
raising the stakes on the strength
of your last Ace.
Stephen Kessler
Maude Meehan, beloved matriarch of the Santa Cruz poetry community for more than 20 years, died in 2007 at the age of 86. Stephen Kessler’s new book of essays, The Tolstoy of the Zulus: On Culture, Arts & Letters, is due this fall from El León Literary Arts. He is the editor and principal translator of The Sonnets by Jorge Luis Borges (Penguin) and the editor of The Redwood Coast Review.
Local Poets, Local Inspiration, edited by Robert Sward, appears weekly online and monthly in Santa Cruz Weekly. Selections are by invitation.
