The Flying Nun Rests Against a Lifeboat, by Pat Valdata

Cape May lll, by Andrew Wyeth (USA) 1992

The Flying Nun Rests Against a Lifeboat
 
Sally Field, between takes, leans 
against a wooden lifeboat, beached.
It’s January. Her bare feet look as cold
as the remnants of snow on the sand.
Under her nun’s costume she wears
a harness that gives her excellent posture.
She cannot slouch like the costume rosary 
sliding off her lap. Her white headdress 
looks like gulls’ wings. In fact, two distant 
gulls like mini-nuns soar by. Beneath this gray 
sky she cannot imagine giving Forrest Gump 
advice and chocolates, or spilling her 
guts over a daughter’s film-set grave,
or standing up for union rights and
winning an Oscar. We already like her,
but she doesn’t know it yet. Her feet hurt.
She’s been up since four a.m. for makeup
and wardrobe. The script changes she has
memorized are as bad as yesterday’s. This
could be the end of my career, she thinks,
unaware of the convent behind her, nuns 
inside peeking out the windows at Sally
and the lifeboat, wishing they, too, might
don a harness and soar through the heavens,
their white veils billowing like sails.

Pat Valdata
​
Pat Valdata is a poet and novelist. Her poetry book about women aviation pioneers, Where No Man Can Touch, won the 2015 Donald Justice Poetry Prize. Her other poetry titles are Inherent Vice and Looking for Bivalve. Her poetry has been published in Ecotone, Fledgling Rag, Italian Americana, Light, Little Patuxent Review, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. She has a new novel, Eve’s Daughters, out from Moonshine Cove Publishing. Her other novels are Crosswind and The Other Sister. Pat is a retired adjunct professor who lives in Crisfield, Maryland, with her husband Bob Schreiber.