When Dolly Doesn’t Walk in the Door - Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

[Lawrence Robinson]

When Dolly Doesn’t Walk in the Door
 
 
I wish she would. I wish she’d breeze in
with her big white smile and her big blonde hair
and her sing song voice saying, “Hi, y’all.” 
I wish she’d come over and sit at the counter
so I could serve her a tall glass of iced tea 
or a cool lemonade. Serve her stories of times 
when her songs met me in dark hours
or lonely hallways, times when I sang 
“Coat of Many Colors,” but heard her voice
instead of mine. Times when I sang about
how wildflowers don’t care where they grow,
somehow feeling so seen by her as a wildflower. 
I would serve her stories of the children 
I used to work with who lived in a small, dirty house 
far from town with an angry dad and an earnest 
mom, and how they got books in the mail every month 
from Dolly’s book club, how those kids and I would sit 
on the old plaid couch and read aloud for hours.
I would want to serve her huge platters of gratefulness
for showing a nation what generosity looks like,
for being a role model for kindness. But I bet Dolly
wouldn’t want a huge platter. My guess is she’d want 
a few honest words, so I would say, Thank you,
and she would probably smile and do that shrug 
she does. Then we’d walk out to the porch 
and sit in the shade and watch as the grass in the field 
tells stories about the shape of the wind. 
It was never going to happen, this meeting, 
but now that Dolly’s gone, I walk outside
with a burgeoning bouquet of many-petalled thank yous 
and toss them into the air. I imagine the wind 
taking them to her, a colorful, fanciful folly. 
I imagine a world where we’re all as generous, 
as loving, as impossible yet possible as Dolly.


	- Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
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