Wendy Barker

March 14, 2023

“Stuff” by Wendy BarkerPosted by

Wendy Barker

STUFF

Who brought these pieces here? Somebody making the shift
to assisted living? Someone’s sixty-something kids after
Mom or Dad had finally “gone aloft,”
as my English granny would have said? The tchotchkes
cramming this antique shop I stroll through with my son:
ivory-handled button hooks, cameo pins,
tureens with porcelain peacock tails for handles. Before she died,
my husband’s mother begged him to take the claw-footed,
eight-foot-tall armoire he hated. At seventy,
my mother labeled every object in her house, color-coded
for each daughter. She wanted to know which one of us
would wear her ruby ring, jade necklace,
turquoise bracelet. Where will my granny’s silver trays,
salt cellars, tea pots, go? What about my mother’s copy—
tattered, water-stained—of Just So Stories,
“O Best Beloved?” The 1924 collection of poems my father
cradled when he read aloud at dinner—will those end up
on my son’s shelves? At Half Price
Books? A garage sale, eBay, landfill? A friend says we spend
the first three-quarters of our lives accumulating, the final
quarter, disposing. As a kid, I treasured
my doll-sized china tea sets, which, packed with crumpled tissue
in a taped box, fell off the back of our truck while leaving
one house for another. Like my photo albums
of the ’60s the movers never found. No pictures left of my black
mascara eye-lashed, mini-skirted, leggy self, no images
of my tennis-playing lover. I’ve read about
the bower birds, who attract their mates with shiny
pebbles and trinkets rescued from trash bins. Did one
of my tiny tea cups end up in some
bird’s bower? Sometimes I crave bare walls, windows open
wide to sky, the oaks, mesquite, and sumac. But who
am I without my journals of the past
twenty years, my embroidered needle case, the filigree
glass vase my husband gave me? Empty as if coming
into this world? Or preparing to leave.

—from Rattle #58, Winter 2017

__________

Wendy Barker: “I can’t not write poetry. I’ve written essays, even scholarly work, but it’s poetry I always come back to. If I’m not working on a poem, I’m in trouble. Something about placing the words, the phrases, the lines, the images, the sounds on a page brings me alive. Alive in the moment. Writing poetry is also a way of examining conflicts or trouble in my own personal space and in the wider world. I’d like to think poems can make a difference. I guess I’m always in thrall to Rilke’s great line: ‘You must change your life.’ And I like to think of Auden’s lines in his poem ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’: ‘For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives / In the valley of its making where executives / would never want to tamper, flows on south / From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, / Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, / A way of happening, a mouth.’ I guess I keep on going because of all those mouths that came before me and that surround me, continually feeding me. And I long to provide a little something for those who are also hungry, so that we can feed each other.” (web)

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January 31, 2020

“In the Endoscopy Center” by Wendy BarkerPosted by

Wendy Barker

IN THE ENDOSCOPY CENTER

I’m led into the cubicle and instructed
by prim little Kristin to “lay down” on the cot,
at which point I reveal my inner grammar
cop and explain that she means I’m to “lie down”
unless she wants to lift me up and plop me
down herself. “Oh,” she blurts, “I didn’t know,”
rushing out before I can pull the stinger. Then
Fred comes in with the IV to put me under for
the gastro doc to probe my entrails, and with
a grin calls me “professor,” adding he’s glad to
see I’m “lying down.” How long had my
inner bitch lain dormant before growling into an
outer bitch? I should have scoped the lay
of the land before going all English prof on this
poor girl. Best to let such sleeping dogs
lie. But my grammatical husband, sitting with me,
chuckles and nods. I sure wouldn’t want
to shock young Kristin with a tale from memory
lane, how in college we joked about who’d
just gotten laid, since I’ll bet she’d be more comfy
if I quoted the old prayer, “Now I lay me
down to sleep,” and I would not want to lay on
her the fact that this beloved man
of mine is, amazingly, still eager to lie with me.

—from Rattle #66, Winter 2019

__________

Wendy Barker: “I’m afraid I’m addicted to poetry, reading and writing—it keeps me breathing. In fact, it’s one reason I can’t stop teaching—I adore workshopping poems with our students, especially the grad students, many of whom are doggone good. And I also adore swapping poems with writer friends—could not do without those delicious exchanges.” (web)

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December 8, 2012

“Sterenfall” by Wendy BarkerPosted by

Wendy Barker

STERENFALL

Anselm Kiefer, 1998, Mixed media on panel, Blanton Museum of Art

Splattered gravel, burned-out forests, residue

                      from forklifts, excavators, back hoes

glued onto this panel and taking up

    what seems the whole wall so you can’t walk by,

                  you’re sucked into a mammoth

3D sinkhole, staring at these clumped twigs

      like abandoned camp fires, or what’s left

                          of flattened or fire-gutted houses,

  as if, with one spark, leaves, birds, lizards,

                anything that wiggled or fluttered was gone,

leaving only crumbled stone and dried out

    splinters, as if you’re peering down from above the planet

        at ridges, fault lines, escarpments, canyons

                that resemble the land down your own street

gone to bulldozers, gutted, ripped

                        of root and vine, the rock bed under

  the trees split into rubble

      to be scraped away before foundations are poured,

as if the ground hadn’t been foundation enough,

            but this huge piece is about what’s left after

everything’s been ground

                            down, after we’ve exploded it all,

taken ourselves out, and the only thing left

                        will be faint tracings of the stories

      of stars you used to look up to.

—from Rattle #37, Summer 2012

Wendy Barker: “Once when Ruth Stone was teaching at UC Davis, where I was a grad student, I asked if she thought I should keep on writing poems. Her answer was simply, ‘Can you stop?’ Of course I couldn’t. I’ve always needed to write—as Jay Parini has said, ‘Poems allow us to metabolize thoughts and feelings.’ Poems keep me going—reading them, writing them. Poetry keeps me connected, within myself, with others, with the world—it keeps me alive.” (web)

 

Wendy Barker is the guest on episode #35 of the Rattlecast! Click here to watch live or archived …

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