Truglio's Preserve

The poetry of friendship

I attended Plymouth State University back in the day. At the time, it was known as a mega party school, and one of my alma mater’s biggest claims to fame was an on-campus photo shoot for Playboy magazine (1987).

During my four and a half years of study at Plymouth State, I was one of the lucky ones who were at the college during an amazing period of English studies professors who sublimed education, if you were willing. My journalism, literature, Shakespeare, poetry teachers were outstanding, each in their own way, and each inculcated in me a deep love for language, expression, and a never-ending deep dive for meaning and questioning. The latter of which drives many people who know me quite mad.

I studied poetry with Dr. Jerry Zinfon. (If poetry, philosophy, and inquiry into meaning hold any attraction for you at all — read his writing on the topics here.)

Dr. Zinfon encouraged me to apply to the Stadler Semester for Younger Poets at Bucknell University (now it’s the Bucknell Seminar) The fellowship was awarded to just two undergrad poets a year back then — selected out of applicants from across the country. It was a minor big deal at the time for my own school, and a major big deal for me (hence, the newspaper clippings below that, yes, I’ve kept all these years — didn’t quite top the Playboy thing, but, hey, I didn’t have to bare my breasts for Bucknell.)

I’m forever grateful for that opportunity to live, breathe, and sleep (sort of) poetry for those three or four months at Bucknell. I didn’t create a lot of great poetry (because I’m not a great, or even a good, poet) — but I did get to absorb the magic of poetry from people like Karl Patten, Jack Wheatcroft (who founded the program), Colette Inez (who was the Visiting Poet during my fellowship and with whom I forged a many-year correspondence until her passing), my co-fellow David Daniels (he and I were published in a chapbook by Bucknell in 1992 and he went on to become an accomplished poet and professor in his own right), and many others.

I also met a man there who became the closest— and most real — friend of my life. He wasn’t in the poetry program but we met, really almost by chance on campus, and his friendship has been one of the most steadily poetic aspects of my life.

I wrote this poem several years after college, in honor of my friend and the poetry of friendship that he brought into my life.

Pixabay

Truglio’s Preserve

You and I

Cool and dark

In the blind

Fixing our eyes

By the slatted sights

Glimpsing life

Just in front of us.

Swooping streaks of iridescence

Gleaming wings

Sprinting through green

Prismatic brilliance

Gorgeous and grave.

A symphony of calls

And cries in reply

Sounding our hearts

With explosions of wonder.

Drunk on lovely

Pressing our minds

To remember

Forgetting, all the while.

You, driving

Us back to your home

Letting me sing

Roaring, half in

Half out

Your car’s window.

Wind in my eyes

Stinging my heart.

And me,

Unresisting

The joy.

Copyright 2021 / Mary Catherine Coolidge

April is National Poetry Month. Make time for poetry — whether in words, in nature, in love, or in a real and abiding friendship.