Famous Reporter # 37 - poetry, Lesley Wheeler: 'Learning to be a Submariner'

LESLEY WHEELER

Learning to be a Submariner

Rivets ensnare the air but

my body is full of brine, weeping

from my skin,

collecting on my spectacles,

puddling at my practical shoes,

as if the sea in me yearns

to join the sea I must shut out.

But I’m a submariner,

I’m smarter than you.

Now I sleep in the deep

and you have forgotten me,

but soon I will rise full

of phosphorescent gossip.

I will sit in my deck chair

and think of my drowned mates

as my eyelashes dry,

as rosemary hones the evening,

as I stroke the dolphin

stitched to my sleeve.

Lesley Wheeler's poems appear in AGNI, Prairie Schooner, Barrow Street, Blackbird, and other publications; her chapbook Scholarship Girl was published by Finishing Line Press in 2007. She holds an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Virginia Commission for the Arts. Her second scholarly book, Voicing American Poetry, appeared from Cornell University Press in 2008. She is also a co-editor with Moira Richards and Rosemary Starace of Letters to the World, an anthology of poems from members of the Women's Poetry Listserv, forthcoming from Red Hen Press. She works as a Professor of English at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.