Symbiosis – Interdependence –
During pursuit of my never achieved degree in Rehab Counseling (at Springfield College) I worked three years at Easter Seal. There were good things about it but it was not a happy experience. I taught Career Exploration – that was the fun part, trying to open the eyes of frightened people diagnosed as “disabled” to the possibilities out there. I knew very little about computers – just coming into vogue – and Easter Seals refused to get me training – but I passed on what little I could figure out. We worked on resumes, interviews, goal setting, and seeing yourself through the employers’ eyes.
While I worked there Easter Seals built a glamorous new building and moved all “managers” out. It was carefully explained to us that anyone actually providing services to clients was unimportant, replaceable, and would be paid as little as possible – being a manager, on the other hand, was a high-status, remunerative, important occupation.
I saw I needed a new job, pronto and used my new skills to get hired at a non-profit start-up of ex-addicts hoping to influence legislation. As the sole “office help” I enjoyed creating business practices from the ground up. I kept track of members and planned member events. Unfortunately, my boss was a very angry man (he once threw a book at me) and was usually seething about what he saw as my completely misplaced confidence and independence. After three years, we had enough work to hire an office helper; but I was not assigned to be her supervisor. This was actually fine with me because I was busy managing a family and writing on the side. You hire a poet at your peril, and I don’t think I could conceal my distaste for office politics. Office Helper observed this dynamic and began immediately planning to take my job. This only worked briefly – once I was pushed out she lasted a month.
I was determined to keep up the good relationships I’d forged, but it turned out to be impossible. Their world was just not my world. In the meantime I had one child in college and another finishing high school – I thought I might make it on a part-time job and on paper I certainly had the skills. The weird interplay with my ex-boss – officially fatherly yet boiling with suppressed sexual rage – gave me an idea for a novel.
Seawracked
He lost her
Spoke too soon
As men are wont
Words freighted by an inner logic
Fell to earth and lay
Prey to busy bristle-footed worms
Tidily dismantle
Subject, verb & predicate;
Sucked out sense and left
The elegiac bones to rot
Amid kelp-wigged rock & glass-rope sponge
Cheek by jowl with
Long dead fishermen’s wives
Punished now for ill-set dough and
Worse-set hair
Mouths agape in imitation of
The badly sutured wounds of childbirth
Secrets told; corpses left to nourish
Nature’s counting-house
One season only; sharing space
With shattered petrels
Feathers spewed like pillow-stuffing
In passing frenzy of love-struck boy s-
Strewn among the shavings of these once great ships
Built by hearts & backs of men
Who loved their daughters far too well –
Losing them to sailors
Crueler than the great sea-god himself;
He who stirs our sleep these nights
With grief-crazed cries of loons
Casting on the waters for their
Far-flung children
Lost forever now
As we are lost as
He lost her.
Alysse Aallyn 