She loved all things Guadalupe. She had a hundred jillion opinions which exasperated me whenever we shared poems with one another, which was pretty much every time either of us wrote a new poem (she didn’t think I ought to use brand names like Kleenex in my work, since this would be puzzling to the natives when my poems would appear in Walloon or Swahili). She was impassioned to the nth degree and spontaneous as the day was long, and her days were long since she had insomnia all her life. I thought I was open and spontaneous, but next to this Bold Soul, I’m a prim and cranky librarian. “Let’s go sit on the rooftop by the lake! Let’s go tour the country with our poems! Let’s dress up as men! Let’s paint the place Madras plaid!” She revered Ellen Bryant Voigt. She loved frogs and frog song and was a sort of computer geek. We laughed our heads off over a hundred first dates with guys who told us they were “wordsmiths,” cried over men we lost, picked through the pile of lingerie and accessories after all our Wally boys danced in drag. She was enchanted and curious about the slightest blip and I could never predict what she’d say or write about anything. How often she would gasp beside me at something she saw and loved or was surprised by.... in her life, I knew how afraid she was sometimes, but in her poems she had no limits. There was nothing she would not say, or could not. Yesterday, I found one of Linda’s poems that had appeared in The Marlboro Review –- it was about her own burial at sea.
Linda asked me a few years back what I wanted of hers when she was gone. The question angered me, but when I calmed down I knew immediately. “Your poems,” I said. I am her literary executor and am told I’d better rent a garage for all the boxes coming my way. I have carried her luggage: God knows the woman never travelled light in her life. Have you ever seen so many bottles of moisturizer, lotion, natural insect repellent, hair products? When she was well.... Aveda may not survive the loss of Linda. She once told me she asked her hairdresser to make her haircut resemble a lampshade. Linda talked this way seriously to hairdressers.
I thought there was more time. I believe Linda thought so too. I thought I’d be with her at the end, holding her hand; I never thought it would be so soon. (I think she is, dammit, was, 45 or 46, but I may be off.) It is unimaginable to me to say goodbye to the Bold Soul and so I won’t. In some dormitory bathroom in the sky, we’re going to be up there still giggling and still disturbing your sleep. I hope next conference we can have the sort of remembrance ceremony Linda would have wanted: plenty of poetry, story, followed by raucous dancing. We shall do the Chunglo in the sky.
For now, ‘twould be a comfort if any of you wish to send your Linda stories. On this hot, hot day I am remembering sitting in the ocean with Linda in Provincetown, watching hermit crabs trade their shells like they were trying on opera coats. For all I know she snuck one in her swimsuit to transport home as a pet.
Much love,
Miss Terri Ford (but to Linda, I was Nardine)
Miss Terri Ford is the author of Why the Ships Are She (Four Way Books, 2001) and the forthcoming Hams Beneath the Firmament, due to appear from Four Way Books in 2007. A fellow at Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference in 2001, Miss Ford was also profiled in June of 2004 in the Minneapolis newspaper City Pages as one of five Minnesota poets who might be the state Poet Laureate if Minnesota had one. She currently lives in triumph in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she hopes to change at least the lipstick on the face of Minnesota poetry, and where she is just beginning to devise a secret handshake for a new secret club in honor of Linda Dyer, the original Bold Soul.
