Salutary Graces Poem by Patti Masterman

For years I lived my life disguised as a child,
Pulling myself bodily
Out of books, with both legs
Hunting for myself, through the eyes of other characters,
Hearing their voices coming out instead of mine
Though there were never enough books
To satisfy my stillborn ego.

I seemed to live in the read-only memories of adults,
Who canned fruits and vegetables
And made sensible meals;
They who remembered to make me take baths
And attended PTA meetings
As though my continued existence depended on it.

There were times I was transposed into a small, bereft house-object
Or a fierce, howling wolf, in the shelter of trees
Around a certain lake,
But they never wavered in their certainty
That I was indeed, a small human being.

They granted me their practicality and forbearance
And their fear and superstition too,
Everything that I might need for the foreseeable future.
They warned me to stop living in books
In case the world should suddenly cave in around me someday.

But in my little world, I had found that I was alone,
Not identifiable by genus or species,
Not unlike a dog which wrongly assumes it must be human,
Only because it is cared for by humans every day.
It was then I realized that I must be an alien,
Though not allowed to talk about it-
Not in this world, where one may speak of anything but the truth.

A world where, if once you place something
It supposedly will always be waiting there, just so,
Admissible evidence even in a court a law-
‘He left the gun there on the veranda,
And there it was found, one month later’.
Case closed. Sound of gavel crashing.

A world where one must contain certain intimate emotions,
Yet loudly proclaim victories or bewail defeats,
Where subtlety is punished
And being vociferous is rewarded.
You must be appropriately labelled or you don't exist;
If you defy a label, you simply cease to be validated.

And after that there was always my secret knowledge
Separating me from the rest,
Who were a seething ocean, where I feared drowning,
Whose rules I comprehended only with difficulty,
And from whose society I found books to be the only escape,
As one escapes from reality in happier dreams,
But always reawakens again
To find themselves in just the same condition as before.

No one knows the true purpose of a dream,
No one knows the true purpose of a life-
But one is always discounted, and one exemplified.