To the Twenty-Five Percent of You
By Mark Williams
Consider the time my dad and I took classes at the Exum climbing school in the Tetons, and one of our classmates was Carol Lawrence. Maria of West Side Story Carol Lawrence. Nicest woman you’d ever want to meet, Carol, and who wouldn’t want to meet her, with that voice and pleasant smile and small feet—perfect for Broadway stages and mountain crevices. So when our wiry climbing instructor invited the class to a meeting at a backwoods cabin that night and Carol asked if she could bring her husband “Bob,” as in Camelot’s “If Ever I Would Leave You” Bob, who wouldn’t want to meet Robert Goulet, even if you were more into Neil Young and the Stones. Only when we get to the meeting, neither Carol nor Bob is there. For that matter, besides the instructor, Dad and I are the only ones from our climbing class to show up. There we are, Dad, me, and twelve or fifteen others sitting in uncomfortable chairs in a rustic cabin listening to the wiry instructor talk about actualizing this, shedding that, and something about dynamics. But before he tells us how to actualize or shed or what he means by dynamics, he has an exercise for us to do. “Pair up,” he says.
I’m always hesitant to describe anyone’s physical characteristics in unflattering ways, so let’s just say that my partner, a young man with chestnut, shoulder-length hair and a narrow face, looks like a horse and leave it at that. “Now, for the next thirty minutes, look into each other’s eyes and let your mind go where it goes,” the instructor instructs. Where my mind goes is, he looks like a horse, followed every so often by, don’t start laughing. I’ve read where three-fourths of Trump voters will vote for him even if he shoots them in the middle of Fifth Avenue first. But to the other twenty-five percent of you who went to the cabin in hope of seeing Carol Lawrence and meeting Robert Goulet (so to speak), but now find yourself stuck in an uncomfortable position, when you feel the slightest tap on your shoulder, conscience, or whatever, whether it’s your father tapping or not, listen to him when he says, “Let’s get out of here,” and get out.
Mark Williams’s poems have appeared in The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, New Ohio Review (online), Rattle, Nimrod, The American Journal of Poetry, and the anthology, New Poetry From the Midwest (New American Press). Finishing Line Press published his poem, “Happiness,” as a chapbook in 2015. His poems in response to the Trump administration have appeared in Poets Reading the News, Tuck Magazine, and The New Verse News. This is his second appearance in Writers Resist. He lives in Evansville, Indiana.