Decades ago, as an honor student in college, she was allowed the freedom of taking poetry as her alternate English class.  All poems were submitted anonymously.  Taking full advantage of the sundrenched California days, they often took turns reciting their classmates’ poems under natural skylight while sitting cross-legged on the stretch of grass just outside their classroom door.  Was this particular poem written about her?  The answer to that question is now lost in time, but she does know that her classmate’s poem had captured her essence.  Through the years she moved around and about, with this special knowledge of why that was her fate; and she kept the copy of her fellow poet’s words, on paper now timeworn and pale, as one of her most valued possessions.

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

Poem by anonymous poetry classmate, 1972-73.