The poems in Begin Empty-Handed ride the hinge between the life expected and the reality of life in process. In response, the mid-life speaker pivots between empathy and disengagement, resulting in paradox and believability. While she surrenders to hard truths—loss of parent, enduring marriage, daughters in trouble, for example—she changes the subject, she digresses, then she looks straight at the pain. Throughout, she remains remarkably witty and ironic. No illness, damage, or danger is made light of; painful situations are witnessed or resisted with a raw, honest, and intermittently comic attitude as the poet goes about the brutal work of letting go. This collection explores how we continue to live our lives in a full and open-hearted way knowing that everything we love will be taken away.
You come to keen for your daughter, dead
by oncology just two weeks. In my notes,
I write down burnt caramel frosting, chocolate
cupcakes made with stout. You tell me how
her head swelled up from the steroids, describe
spasms and hemorrhage. I write, dad riding
in the trunk of a Chevy Coupe from Michigan
to Missouri, 1940. I’m on the dock, arguing
about minnows. I say pedal, he says he couldn’t
think of a worse verb to describe the way they
move. I say flicker then skitter, but the water
is so clear and minnow rhymes with winnowing,
that gradual scattering and blowing away. Which
is what’s happening to my parents who walk
holding hands, back to shore.
holding hands, back to shore.Your words disappear
faster than watches from the wrists of old people
in nursing homes. You sleep on a blow-up mattress
in the living room, her ashes on the bed beside you.
You want to know if that is sick. I write down
the summer I underlined much of Corinthians,
and what boy doesn’t love a shipwreck?
Listen to “I Don’t Want to Say How Lost I’ve Been,” read by Gail Martin at Perugia Press’s 20th anniversary celebration at Smith College on November 12, 2016:
