Posts Tagged ‘Sue Walker’

Published by Poetry Editor on August 25, 2016. This item is listed in Issue 31, Issue 31 Poetry, Poetry

The Faltering

The Cardiology Unit: The Day Before The Pacemaker-Defibrillator Procedure

2 Walker_Faltering I say it is a matter of heart my husband’s in its faltering, in its failure to keep pace and my inability to understand the penetralium of this place of this tectonic shift, the earth in its constant state of change.

Here on the 8^th floor 1305 York Avenue, NYC 10:00 a.m. he arrives for an echocardiogram and pre-op bloodwork. Here in the Waiting Room, consider stylishness, the comforting cool blue-gray walls, the magazines, none dated 6-8 months ago. Waiting rooms are a large part of a patient’s healthcare experience. Do not consider others who wait: those in wheelchairs, those hobbling with canes or those who are young and seem not to belong in this realm of Faltering.

Here in another room scarcely larger than a shoebox, a technician takes Albert’s blood— three vials of it, blood full of answers. I watch and think: red blood cells, white cells think platelets, hemoglobin, corpuscles, I am boarding up glass windows moving against fear. “Do what you are trained to do to overcome dread;” I think of poetry, of Naomi Nye asking: “where can the crying heart graze?”

I am married to a Brit; he is not au fait when it comes to determinations of blood, and though I plead with the air, I bloody-well don’t want his heart put out to pasture.

525 East 68^th Street: NYP Cornell—Surgery

The procedure will take 3-4 hours; I reckon time, check my chronometer, my knowledgeable Apple that will keep pace, consider physics: scalar quantity but no direction.

Before clocks and Apple watches there were always shadows cast by gnomons dark spaces like this space my heart habits in the surgical waiting room. In 11 B.C., the shadow cast by a sundial was noted in Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art.” “Art” is embedded in “heart and time is a dark shadow of waiting a feeling of dread.

I want to turn back time some 40 years. I want to be in New Orleans ride the streetcar named Desire on my way to hear (and hear, too, is embedded in “heart”). We are in the French Quarter in New Orleans. I feed him oysters drink a Pimms Cup or two and listen to Lizzie Miles of Faubourd Marrigny sing “A Good Man Is Hard To Find.” And there he is, that good man of mine there we are not merely as pieces of existence – but existence as a whole.

— Sue Walker

Sue Walker, M.Ed, MA, and Ph.D., is the publisher / editor of Negative Capability (Mobile, Ala). She was Poet Laureate of Alabama from 2003-2012 and Stokes Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of South Alabama where she retired in July 2015. In 2013, she received the Eugene Garcia Award for outstanding scholarship by the Alabama Council of English and a Mellen Award for outstanding scholarship for her critical work on James Dickey, The Ecopoetics of James Dickey. She has received several Pushcart nominations and numerous creative writing awards for fiction, non-fiction, drama, and poetry. She has published eight books of poetry, numerous critical articles, drama, fiction, and nonfiction. She has spoken and given workshops throughout the U.S.A. and abroad. Sue is the President of the Alabama Writers’ Conclave.

Editor’s Notes: This is a beautiful love poem with an experimental layout that echoes the title, as well as a troubled heartbeat. Two images are superimposed: a multicolored “One Love EKG” and a more clinical EKG softened by a heart (Pinterest).

Published by Poetry Editor on August 25, 2016. This item is listed in Issue 31, Issue 31 Poetry, Poetry

Cuckoo

He had trucked downstairs. The night was only beginning – like the night before – and the one before that. It was 7:54 p.m. Once a stripling in the full sway of manhood, he didn’t speak – just hauled off and descended the stairs.

3 Walker_Cuckoo In the kitchen, she had cleaned crumbs off the counter. Probably the fourth time that day – or was it the day, the month, the year before – the crumbs—accumulating through obsolete years. “Crumbs,” Thelma Louise said to herself. “Crumbs. Crumbs.” She remembered how Gretel had scattered crumbs, she and Hansel. It was a grim thought. God, I’ve heard of affairs that are strictly platonic.

“Oh, my god,” she said again – but this wasn’t a prayer, even though the gods had played a part in life’s determinations about the great beyond for thousands of years; she was, however, no Athena. There were bags under her eyes. Brown spots on her hands. Protruding veins. She finished wiping crumbs again. And again, she would swish the dishcloth under the faucet, depositing the tidbits in the sink before turning on the disposal. There were fruit flies on the watermelon.

He had trudged upstairs now—as was customary – night, noon, and morning. He held out his hand, giving a biscuit to the dog¹ who was, as usual, lying on her pallet. It had a discriminating appetite though it had once been a stray, a rescue. Now it slept in Thelma Louise’s bed, and snored. Sometimes, she would take her foot and kick it, whereupon it would hop off for awhile and return again – jumping on the bed and nudging itself against Hans, her husband who would kick it again – and so the night passed – like the night before – and the dog, without actual proof of residency, felt now a true sense of hominess.

Now, an hour had passed. Bread was baking in the oven. She could smell it upstairs. “Nothing smells as good as homemade bread!” Thelma Louise exclaimed. “The staff of life,” even if from a 7-grain mix, and the crumbs, she would lick her fingers, savoring each dib and dab rich with salted butter—and she would lick each finger in turn—the index finger first, then the thumb – and then last, as usual, the ring finger with the wedding band she’d worn for sixty years. Soon it would be her Diamond Anniversary. “Crumbs,” and she started to sing, the tune emerging throatly:

I’ve heard of affairs that are strictly platonic
But diamonds are a girl’s best friend
And I think affairs that you must keep masonic are better bets
If little pets get big baguettes,
Time rolls on and youth is gone and you can’t straighten up when you bend
But stiff back or stiff knees you stand straight at… Tiffany’s…

It was midnight now, and Thelma Louise couldn’t sleep. It was often this way, yesterday, the night before, the night before that. Time was not the shortest distance. The climate was changing; how, pray would it alter the eco-system? The children were grown and had flown the coop, and the cuckoo² clock she’d bought in Germany years before; she was 19 then and had gone abroad a whole summer because her parents hadn’t wanted her to marry her college beau. Thought she might get interested in a swarthy Italian who would serenade her and take her on an all-night gondola ride. The clock, crumbs, it hadn’t worked for years—just sat there on the wall, the little bird on it’s perch, the door broken. “Crumbs,” Thelma Jean said—and she kicked the damn dog off the bed.

“Beast,” she screamed. It had scoffed not just one tablet, but a whole pill pot – the “rejuvenix” pills that would turn back the clock on aging; take each night before bedtime and wait for morning. Now no refills.

— Sue Walker

________________________________________________________

The dog’s name is not Sandy as in Orphan Annie.
It is/ it was a traditional cuckoo clock with leaves and two lovebirds on top.

Editor’s Notes: This is another experimental poem, with some hybrid structure, that at the very least subverts form while maintaining a prose disguise. The image is that of a traditional cuckoo clock that has been warmed, enhanced and vignetted.

Published by Associate Editor on August 19, 2014. This item is listed in Issue 23, Issue 23 Poetry, Poetry

What Is Found There by Sue B. Walker

narrated by Sue B. Walker

(A cento)

What Is Found There by Sue Walker Illustration by Sue Babcock

One night after the family had gone to bed under the girders of a causeway bridge to drown themselves in the stark eyes of the moon, and there in the desperation of hard economic times, the little girl said “Is that it then? Are we beside ourselves?” And you sit and think about the puzzle of time passing, of mortality, of human choice—like you want me to answer Jesus of Nazareth, Genghis Khan, and Eva Braun and say Motherhood integrates bio-procreational and social processes.

References:

William Carlos Williams, Selah Saterstrom, The Pink Institution, Jeffrey Goodman, “Under the Bridge,” Aileen Kilgore Henderson, “The Dreamers And The Realist,” William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, Pat Conroy, The Pat Conroy Cookbook, Johnny Summerfield, Table Five, Kathleen M. Bolen, “Prehistoric Construction of Mothering”

Sue B. Walker is the Stokes Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of South Alabama in Mobile, Alabama and the Poet Laureate of Alabama from 2003-1012. She is the publisher of Negative Capability Press and the journal’s editor.