OPEN BOOKS: A POEM EMPORIUM

Here’s an unusual double-duty entry: both a special Thank You to my favorite poetry bookstore Open Books in Seattle, where I stand around and gab for hours about all-things poetic while browsing the fabulous shelves (over 9,000 titles and counting!—indeed the poetry reader’s paradise), and a special Friday Shout Out to its co-proprietor, poet J.W. Marshall—John, to you and me—whose debut book of poems, winner of the 2007 FIELD Poetry Prize, was just released. Poetry poetry everywhere, indeed.

The following is part 22 from a touching 27-part autobiographical sequence, “Taken With,” that narrates the collapse (and eventual death) of the poet’s mother, Eleanor, of a stroke.
I was back to help clean out her room when
an old man misaligned in his wheelchair shouted
Young man come here from a corner of the lounge.
No staff visible and again Young man come here.
I went and stood in front of him like we were in the military.
Young man I have a question. I said yes?
Was that man I saw a while ago over there my mother?
I’ve rarely felt as certain as I did then and I said no.
He said again I want to know if that man I saw a little while ago
was my mother. No panic in his voice just level curiosity.
I said no again like I was a visiting academic. Are you certain?
I’m certain I said and he said Okay. I just wanted to know.
Thank you young man. I went back to her last room.
And what if I had said I’m your mother and I still love you?
One of the tropes in this collection is the jigsaw puzzle—the speaker sees one in the obituary page, in the segregating street grid of downtown Seattle, in the cells that bleed into one another to create motion in a film, in the experience of disorientation at a hospital recovery lounge or a waiting room: always an effort to pull the self together by collecting the surrounding pieces to make one’s environment whole.
So too the long poem “Taken With,” itself a reconstruction of events, a timeline gathered piece by piece because its entirety is devastating. And even if the pieces don’t fit together perfectly, the result is a necessary therapy. Comfort comes from memory and communication, not accuracy.
In the poem above, a similar dynamic occurs: the speaker, succumbing to his grief, must fit whatever comes his way, no matter what shape, no matter how odd, into his own “misaligned” narrative, he who must move forward in the world with “pieces” of himself now missing:
Eleanor Wallace
all loss is small loss
Eleanor Wallace
The long poem, the third section in the book, engages the matter of emotional recovery, and section one centers on the poet’s physical recovery after getting hit by a car. They embrace the middle section “Where Else,” a celebration of everyone’s beloved and complicated Northwest city: “Seattle is a rubble kit too.” Perhaps the poem that truly captures the complexity of this sometimes brutal, sometimes beautiful place is the haiku-like poem “April”:
Reading while walking
a fist of cherry blossoms
punished her.
Marshall is a poet with sensibilities well-tuned to the emotional landscape of loss and the difficult process of healing. He’s a collector of the smaller details that become representative of a greater experience.
(From Meaning A Cloud, published by Oberlin College Press, 2008.)