V E R S E and I M A G E

How insistent the world wakes you,

Daylight pushes through dense blinds.

A one-note bird insists on an answer.

Always the same pulsing – waking – wanting

to know what next? How to parse a life

caught in mid-flight, the light a web woven

in the night. All the things we never talk about.

We let the stories we tell ourselves define us.

What would we be without the myths?

Desire contains ire. De- as in deconstruct,

dismantle the dire. Desire nothing. Construct

your own lifeline. Getting lost may be the last

best thing that ever happens.

from Because I Did Not Drown, Main Street Rag Enterprises, Edinboro, PA; © 2025

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I think I know where I’ve been and I imagine I know where I’m going. But do I really know anything? I certainly don’t know where this narrative is going. Josh and I are sitting beside a rutted gravel track eating lunch. It’s the last meal of our last day on the trail. Sometime this afternoon a banged up old van will arrive to carry us all back to base camp. While the boys joke around and my co-leaders snooze, I gather some of the trash left by previous loungers and eaters. I lift a sandwich wrapper and discover a pocket knife.

The summer of 1969 Linda and I started going together. About a week after we held hands for the first ime – had we even kissed yet? – I got on a bus in Akron at 5 AM with three fellow Boy Scouts to spend two weeks at Philmont Scout Ranch in Cimarron, New Mexico. Now it’s the summer of 1983 and our own two kids are teenagers. Josh, our eldest, and I have just finished ten days of hiking Philmont together with his troop – desert plateau and Ponderosa pine forests, rushing gorges and a 12,000 foot peak. Our big adventure is ending. I stuff refuse into my sandwich bag and discover that pocket knife.

In the summer of 2025 I rummage my desk to return that knife to my pocket. I can’t find it. Turn out the pockets of all my pants, upend my day pack, creep beneath the desk and out to the car under all the seats – not there. I have often pictured the Boy Scout who lost that fine, top-of-the-line Swiss Army Scout’s knife. He had sat there on the ground eating lunch the day before I did. The knife stealthily squeezed its way out of his pocket. He littered his garbage on the knife and never missed it until that night. Too late. Karma. He violated the ethic of Leave No Trace and relinquished his knife to me, diligent trash picker. And such a knife – lock-blade, screw driver & awl, little tweezers and trademark Victorinox toothpick. I will carry it for over forty years, sharpen it and oil it, admire it every time I pull it out and wonder at my worthiness.

Now I’m imagining someone else finding my knife, excuse me, our knife. Beside a hiking trail where I had squatted to identify a flower? In a parking lot stuck to tar? Appreciate it. Or don’t. I held it for a good long time. This is letting go.

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Coming out of the pandemic

+++ I’m having trouble

knowing how to act.

+++ This new landscape

more hardscrabble than highway,

+++ a tightrope walk

not a garden promenade.

When I offer my outstretched hand

+++ to a woman

I’ve just met, she fixes me

+++ with a chilly stare, says,

+++ And suddenly I’m ashamed

of my bacteria-filled palm, its brazen

+++ need for connection.

Is it also infected with The Virus? I’m tempted

+++ to rush away, down the hall

and lather that offending hand

+++ with hot sudsy water, the way

we scrubbed our vegetables not so long ago.

How do I move from cautious

+++ to community?

The knitters know. When they notice

+++ the chaos in the coffee shop,

the customers shouting out orders,

+++ the din around them rising like bread,

impossible to ignore,

+++ Jane stitches herself

to the cash register,

+++ Linda begins bagging cookies

Cathy slices strawberry cake. Their hands

+++ smooth the angry air

grown thick with impatience

+++ and want.

The knitters’ hands fly like needles –

+++ knit one, purl two,

opening, closing, shaping. Each palm

+++ holds a single need to serve.

from Because I Did Not Drown, Main Street Rag Enterprises, Edinboro, PA; © 2025

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Pat Riviere-Seel writes and writes and writes. Has written, is writing, will write. A solid lifetime of essays, poetry, technical pieces, editing, teaching – her life has been creating with words. Because I Did Not Drown is a portmanteau of Pat’s life, her writing life, her life in writing. A memoir fits pieces into a whole – dates and sequences, family and relationships, loves and desires. A good memoir colors them all with the deeper hues of the soul – fear and disappointment, aspirations and joy. This memoir achieves all that plus one more thing: the crystalline beauty awakened by poetry. Each memory in prose is accompanied by one or two poems. Poems touch and reveal the soul of these moments in Pat’s life.

I discover myself in these poems, not as outward subject but inward seeker. I often find that I more fully inhabit and participate in the lines of a poem that in a paragraph of prose. The distilled essence of poetry is like volatile spirit that shoots straight from tongue to consciousness. Wonderfully intoxicating. A draught that frees and connects. Next time we meet, Pat and I, we shall surely dance.

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I can still see that knife. I thought to replace it but the model is no longer manufactured and someone wants eighty bucks on Ebay for one like it. Plus it wouldn’t be the object found, the discovery, the reward. Nevertheless, I can still see that knife because this week I found it shoved in the back of a drawer. Where is this narrative going? Is nothing ever truly lost that once occupied a space in one’s heart? Bosh! Or perhaps the finding is the thing rather than the thing that’s found. Tomorrow I will sit to eat a sandwich with my son and I won’t be able to keep myself from peaking beneath the napkin.

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Because I Did Not Drown by Pat Riviere-Seel, a memoir in prose and verse, is available from Main Street Rag Enterprises.

Selected poems from previous books by Pat Riviere-Seel:

The Serial-Killer’s Daughter (2009)

Nothing Below But Air (2014)

When There Were Horses (2021)

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+++ for SLM

how since your death

the natural world keeps itself,

kaleidoscopic, the brilliant shimmer,

sunlight silvering bay leaves, the veins

of water oak, the dogwood’s sad commentary –

now a winsome glow,

as if every molecule of you

infuses this Earth you loved.

I expected otherwise – had your death been

anything I considered – that the birds and trees,

the swamps and all that still lives would mourn

as we do. The landscape would lose itself,

fade into shades of gray. The rain that all summer

refused to fall would flood the highest ground.

But now you’ve turned to glimmer. Each glance

into the world I thought I knew brings

a new configuration. You remain everywhere.

from Because I Did Not Drown, Main Street Rag Enterprises, Edinboro, PA; © 2025

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