A Gift of Poetry
Meg Weston on ee cummings and Robert Frost
Sometimes we wander a twisted path to discover the truth of our memories. I remember there was a poem found in my mother’s purse when she died. She’d introduced me to poetry in my teenage years in the ‘60s. ee cummings was a favorite, but I don’t really recall who else. When I was 21, and she was just 48, she died suddenly of a heart attack. My father had a line of verse inscribed on her headstone: She rode up on one ‘til the bubble burst… He passed away six years later, at 54, and in the following years, with no one to ask, I began to recall in pieces some other lines of the poem it came from, but not all of them. I thought perhaps it was cummings, but it didn’t really sound like what I knew of his poetry.
I rode up on one ‘til the bubble burst, and when that left me to sink back reversed, I was no worse off than I was at first…
The words in this simple poem captured the way my mother lived—with great enthusiasm, and great sadness. When I’d gone as far away to college as I could—to Reed College in Portland, Oregon—she wrote to me from Connecticut almost every day, with all of her troubles and worries. Some about my older brother, some about her life, about the “troubles” as she called the ‘60s with the war in Vietnam and all that seemed to be going wrong in our nation. She read deeply and felt deeply.
Many years later I bought a volume of Complete Poems of ee cummings and searched for this poem. Of course, his poems didn’t have titles, and these lines weren’t among the first lines that served as the index to each poem—over 1,000 pages of them! It wasn’t until sometime in my ‘50s, I received an unexpected gift from a man I had been seeing—a precious first edition of In the Clearing by Robert Frost that contained the poem “In a Glass of Cider.” All the missing words were there in this little gem of a poem. Her life captured in a glass of cider and given back to me. What a gift!
In a Glass of Cider
by Robert Frost
It seemed I was a mite of sediment
That waited for the bottom to ferment
So I could catch a bubble in ascent.
I rode up on one till the bubble burst
And when that left me to sink back reversed
I was no worse off than I was at first.
I’d catch another bubble if I waited.
The thing was to get now and then elated.
Meg Weston currently serves as president of the Millay House Rockland board. She is the co-founder, director, and host of thepoetscorner.org, an online poetry community, and is co-founder and co-director of the Camden Festival of Poetry. She has published several books of poetry, and her work appears in various anthologies and literary magazines. She retired from her position as President of Maine Media Workshops + College in 2020, and has also served in many different leadership roles in media and education.
