A Poem for a Thursday #112

June Robertson Beisch was a journalist who turned poet in her forties. She published poetry in such journals as The Literary Review and Harvard Review. Her poems were read three times by Garrison Keillor on his radio show. I stumbled across one of her poems and read it because it first line references a favorite aunt. I have a favorite aunt, though mine isn’t much like the frazzled, overpermed one in this poem, and I like the stanza that begins “The auntness of aunts.” I also learned a new word from this. Inutile means “useless, unusuable.”

My favorite aunt was unmarried, half deaf
and lived alone in a smoke-filled room
at the Curtis Hotel in Minneapolis.
Once beautiful, she still had her vanity.

Her hip, mangled in surgery,
gave her a spasmodic gait, she flapped
down Oakland Avenue to visit us
like a tall crane who'd had a few.

I loved the sight of her, ran to
the frazzled, overpermed head, the
too-bright ruby lips, the strong perfume.
For all the appearances of inutile feminity,

she was to me, a half divinity.

The auntness of aunts, their
bemused, hat-askance objectivity.
They belong to no one and to everyone
and can offer a child another reality.

How many times she took me home
to her apartment hoping to give
my busy mother a small reprieve
handed me a pencil and drawing pad

then made me feel like Michaelangelo.
Now thinking back, I wish I had
given back just half of what she gave to me. 

Aunt Bobby
June Robertson Beisch