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Self-Portrait?
Don Colburn

The emcee for tonight’s reading beckons me
out of the coffee line, brandishing her notepad.
Wants me to know that introducing poets
is a waste of time for everyone.
How could I not like Terri, her lack of slack,
her tone so right-on that I take her seriously
even if she’s joking. Today her hair is purple.
Would she say lilac? Maybe lavender.
Here’s my idea, she says, and I’m all ears:
No book titles, no prizes nobody has heard of.
No “debut” or “garnered” or “incomparable.” No blurbs.
I’ll ask each of you one simple question
and your quick-and-easy will be the whole shebang.
So… If you were a punctuation mark…

and I flinch. I see Barbara Walters on TV
ask Hepburn what kind of tree she was.
Trick question, I say to myself, overthinking.
Probably not a semi-colon is what comes out
first. I’m stalling, still in need of coffee.
Terri nods expectantly. Not an exclamation point
is my next attempt to keep truth in play
without letting it box me in. Her nod this time
gives a hint of miff. Not a comma either, I plod on,
and now Terri’s annoyed, her brilliant ploy
foundering on a poet’s refusal to follow directions.
Time’s up, she snaps. Her felt-tip pen lands
on the pad with a flourishing curl and a jab
to put me down as a question mark.

—
Don Colburn came to poetry late, in the midst of a newspaper career. A longtime reporter for The Washington Post and The Oregonian, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing. He has published five poetry collections, including four chapbooks; all five won or placed in national manuscript competitions. His latest, Mortality, With Pronoun Shifts, won the Cathy Smith Bowers chapbook award. His full-length book, As If Gravity Were a Theory, won the Cider Press Review Book Award. Other honors include the Discover/The Nation Award, the Finishing Line Press Poetry Prize, and residencies at MacDowell and Yaddo. Colburn moved last year from Oregon to Maine.

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