ELLISTON POET, R.I.P. – part 4 [by Lesley Jenike]

I want to preface the story I’m about to tell you with these
two small but important provisos: 1. Now that I own my own car, I’ll happily
give a lift to any number of fake poets, drunk, high or sober. 2. Any resemblance
to people living or dead is purely accidental.

 Let me explain.

I was used to being poor and in a constant state of terror,
so after I earned my M.F.A. at OSU, I figured, what’s five more years of
graduate school? I was coming home to Cincinnati to get my Ph.D. and I would be
studying poetry at the University of Cincinnati, home to the renowned Elliston
Poet-in-residence program, a program that brought Robert Lowell and John
Ashbery to the Queen City where Lowell, as legend has it, went nuts in Burnet Woods, and where
I would eventually go nuts in Cheviot
(only not as epically).

 And this was 2003, before Google became,
like, a thing. It was my first year in the program and my fellow students
Sophia (now my colleague at the Columbus College of Art and Design) and Kevin
and I had been given the honor of retrieving C.D. Wright, our
Elliston Poet-in-Residence, from the airport, but I had only one picture of
C.D. Wright and it was a precarious likeness at best.

 I had some basic information about Wright’s flight from some
professor or other, but because this was before Google was, like, a thing, and
because I’d somehow managed to leave the house without any contact number for
any professor who might know anything about anything, Sophia, Kevin and I found ourselves
blinking up at Arrivals to find that
Wright’s flight had been Delayed for
many, many hours. We weren’t sure what to do except wait and hope we’d be paged
over the intercom or that miraculously my professor had my cell phone number,
which would’ve been supremely helpful, but weird.

 So we waited. We sat for a while at the coffee place. One or
more of us might’ve had coffee. We thumbed through magazines at the magazine
stand and I remember Kevin looking at Travel
and Leisure and there was a woman in an American flag bikini on a yacht
on the cover and I remember him looking at it like it was something from
another planet.

 Meanwhile the flight’s arrival time was getting later and
later. Do we leave? What if C.D. Wright landed and no one was there to greet
her? Oh but we had so many papers to write and whole chapters of Jameson to
read and if airports are purgatorial on a good day, we’d arrived at some
supreme limbo in which neither Godot nor C.D. Wright
would ever, ever come to plug up our muzak-addled ears with Good News.

 We moved from a kind of organized, controlled anger (how
could they not have given us a
contact number?) to the sort hysteria poets are prone to when abandoned to
awkward social situations for far too long. How much small talk could we
manage? Things got metaphorical. We rode the escalator morosely up and down. Up
and down. Do you like sestinas? I like sestinas. Sometimes. I kept reminding
myself that I could write about this whole thing someday and achieve some
modicum of revenge, but it was cold comfort.

 Then, it happened: after something like four hours the plane
landed because the screen said it did. Finally. But now came the hard part: how
would we recognize her? Should we have made a sign? Why didn’t we make a sign?
Would she know us? We’d be the bleary-eyed, uncombed ones and therefore
graduate students.

 I had an idea she had shortish, blondish hair and that she
was somewhere around middle-aged, thin and probably wearing jeans and boots, so
we watched for this fantasy version of C.D. Wright as folks started coming down
the hallway toward baggage claim. We saw a couple of women that could’ve been
her and we all smiled in that crazy, expectant way that says, You don’t know who I am yet, but I’m here! Still,
no one seemed to be looking for us. Nope.
Nope. Nope. Nope again.

 By this time we were all really digging deep to find our inner
gregarious hostesses. No one wants
to see a long face, my mom would always say, but my friend Kevin was doing a
tremendous job of cultivating his long face and even our inner gregarious
hostesses were thinking: This woman
better be freaking amazing and help us get jobs and postdocs and publications or…

 and there she was. She fit the crazed description I’d
slapped together in my head and by my colleagues’ expressions, I knew they
agreed with me: shortish, blondish hair, thin, etc.: C.D. Wright. But this
woman was weaving up and down the hallway and her body had the kind of loopiness
that comes from drinking. A lot of drinking. She was obviously alone and maybe
even looking for someone, but we couldn’t be sure because we’d been trained in
instability and doubt; we were graduate students.

 We eyed each other. Should we approach her? No. No. Not yet.
We followed a few feet behind, watching her. She veered back and forth across the
hallway then stood swaying, looking up at the monitors that tell you which baggage carousel
will spit out your luggage, then she staggered over to it and I mumbled
something about pills; this woman wasn’t just drunk, I said; she was overmedicated.
She was on pills and she was wasted.
She was our Distinguished Visiting Poet and she was wasted. I mean, she looked like she’d rubbed her head on a balloon.
And what about my car, I said. I mean, what if we get her in my car and she
throws up all over it? What am I gonna tell my dad? One of my friends said, at least it would be a famous poet’s
throw up.

 We watched her lean over the carousel, looking for her bag
with a drunk’s peculiar brand of concentration and then we watched her fall
into the carousel. She fell into the
carousel. Our Distinguished Visiting Poet fell into the baggage carousel and proceeded to take one, inelegant
turn around it, legs up in the air.

 So what do we do now? Is this what we signed up for?
Seriously? Is this what our prospective profession has doomed us to? We
might’ve wept in each others’ arms if we weren’t so terrified of our Poet’s
embarrassment and our professors’ embarrassment and our own, overwhelming
embarrassment.

We stood, unmoving, still watching, until someone suggested
we just leave. Let’s just leave. But how could we leave?

 An airport employee or two helped our Poet up out of the
carousel, dusted her off, and said something stern to her. At least that part
was over, right? And maybe it wasn’t really her; maybe the real C.D. Wright had whizzed past us, grabbed a cab and found her
own way to her hotel with the kind of ingenuity and self-reliance we’d expected
from her all along. And maybe we’d show up at workshop in two days and she’d be
there, totally sober, totally cool and happy to have managed on her own, no
fuss.

 So when we finally made our move, it was with the kind of amplified
adrenalin crooks must feel leaving a crime scene; maybe we wouldn’t get caught,
but then again, maybe we would. We drove home in a silence punctuated here and
there by bursts of insane laughter and when we parted, we parted reluctantly.
We’d been to the wars.

 It wasn’t until a few days later that I learned C.D. Wright
had called in to say she wasn’t taking her original flight but had booked
herself on a flight the following day. These are graduate school humiliations.
You swallow them and move on.

 And when we finally did meet the real C.D. Wright she was obviously not the kind of woman who’d fall
into a baggage carousel, but she was the
kind of woman who’d come to your shitty apartment in East Walnut Hills and
record her groundbreaking book One
Big Self on your husband’s home recording equipment while a plague of
seventeen-year cicadas whirred and buzzed against the windows. But that’s
another story…