WENDY BARKER’s fifth collection of poetry, a novel in prose poems, Nothing Between Us: The Berkeley Years, was runner up for the Del Sol Prize (Del Sol Press, 2009). Earlier full-length collections of poetry include Poems from Paradise (WordTech, 2005), Way of Whiteness (Wings Press, 2000), Let the Ice Speak (Ithaca House, 1991), and Winter Chickens (Corona Publishing Co., 1990). She has also published three chapbooks, Things of the Weather (Pudding House Press, 2009), Between Frames (Pecan Grove Press, 2006) and Eve Remembers (Aark Arts, 1996). She has published poems in such journals as Atlas, Gettysburg Review, Poetry, Georgia Review, Southern Review, and Boulevard, and is recipient of NEA and Rockefeller fellowships as well as twice receiving the Violet Crown Book Award. Her selection of poems with accompanying essays, Poems’ Progress, is widely used in creative writing courses, and her translations (with Saranindranath Tagore) from the Bengali of Rabindranath Tagore received the Sourette Diehl Fraser Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. She is also the author of Lunacy of Light: Emily Dickinson and the Experience of Metaphor and co-editor (with Sandra M. Gilbert) of The House is Made of Poetry: The Art of Ruth Stone. A Fulbright lecturer to Bulgaria in 2000, her work has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Bulgarian, and Punjabi. She is Poet-in-Residence and a professor of English at UTSA, where she has taught since 1982. She has one son, the musician Dave Barker, and lives with her husband, critic and biographer Steven G. Kellman.
I’m Not Sure the Cherry Is the “Loveliest of Trees”
So from the first line of the poem I’m quibbling, and I don’t even teach this poem now I’m pushing threescore and ten. All that counting Housman has us busy doing, figuring the speaker’s age, and I know in class we’d end up focusing on the stanzas with the math. Yet students never had trouble getting hold of the poem’s carpe diem message: inhale the scent of roses while you can. I’ve never seen a flowering cherry, have never known spring in Washington D.C. or England or been invited to a hanami, a party to view the blooms in Tokyo. But I knew the dogwoods lacing my first hesitant steps, have known white pines’ needles gleaming with light reflected from a northern lake, and I’ve known the palo verdes in the dusty Sonoran desert where Rudy, my first boyfriend, kissed me. And the olives I planted with my former husband, shoveling down into Phoenix hardpan. The eucalyptus lifting their astringent scent in the Berkeley hills where I lay in a carpet of fog-softened leaves, ecstatic with a lover. The lemon tree by the front door of the house where my son was born. I could say “with rue my heart is laden” for these and all the trees I may never see again: banyans and teak, neem trees, cinnamon and coconut palms, the bodhi tree—under which the Buddha sat so still. And since I haven’t many springs left in me—a dozen? two?—maybe, like the woman diagnosed with terminal cancer who traveled seven continents compiling a life list of eight thousand birds, I could search out all the trees I’ve never seen, including the blossoming cherry. In California there’s a bristlecone that’s lived for almost five thousand years, and in Sweden, a spruce that’s lived for close to ten. That woman’s travels kept her cancer in remission, her doctors were amazed. But how can I leave our own Mexican persimmon near the drive, its peeling layers of coppery silver bark, its branching trunk I can’t begin to wrap my arms around.
(Originally published in New Letters, 2011)
On Teaching Too Many Victorian Novels In Too Short a Space of Time During Which the Reader Becomes
Stuffed, like a twenty-pound turkey crammed to the crust-slithery maw not with croutons and giblets, but ribbons, pendants, waistcoats, ruffles, and plumes till I’m dazed, logy, needing a nap trying to keep track during eight hundred pages of Bulstrodes, Cadwalladers, Featherstones, Chichelys, Plymdales, Hackbutts, and Minchins, when those English villages didn’t hold as many people as I pass daily on the interstate in fifteen minutes or dodge at the mall the day after Thanksgiving or slump down with at the gate waiting for the delayed flight or stare at on CNN or MSNBC in an hour, surfing through head after talking head, each expounding to me lounging on my couch as though we were all seated around a mahogany table loaded with glistening plate and leaded goblets, embossed napkins, and candelabras. But the sixteen of us at five metal-legged tables jigsawed together in our department’s closet of a seminar room with no possibility of pushing back chairs, leaning into pillows, gazing into a fire, and holding to the light a snifter of cognac the color of autumn leaves somewhere in an English village, are chatting away as though we are neighbors, as if the characters in Middlemarch lived next door, and we’ve become vicar, solicitor, seamstress and a cousin all rolled into one, as we analyze Dorothea’s encumbered vistas, Lydgate’s tightening financial noose—how lonely, how restricted, we say, grateful for the roominess, the promise of our lives, though none of us mentions our Mastercard or Chevy Avalanche payments, just as we ignore the fact that few of us have met our own neighbors, since nobody ever asks anybody over for tea or drinks or Scrabble, and if somebody is burgled or shot, we might hear about it on the car radio driving home after Monday’s 5:30 class, another night without dinner.
(Originally published in The Gettysburg Review, 2008.)
Teaching Mrs. Dalloway I’m Thinking
How I’d like to buy flowers, how I’d like to place a sterling silver bowl of peonies or cut-glass vase of tulips and irises on the laminate seminar table in this windowless room, and I’m thinking how I’d like to arrive before the one student always a half-hour early, how I’d like to greet each of them at the door, inquire after their sisters and cousins, their tíos and abuelitas, and comfort the one who’s been fired from his job. Every Tuesday another novel about the modern condition, those catchy phrases we use: “alienation and fragmentation”—while for the past three weeks Jill, the debate team captain on two scholarships, hasn’t said a word because, she told me sobbing at the break, her boyfriend was found bloody in his apartment, shot by her brother off his meds, and Angie, dispatching for Pleasure U Hot Line, her shift moved to graveyard, slumps dozing in her chair. Now Jeffrey is saying, “She’s snobbish, Clarissa, I don’t like her, who cares about her maids and her flowers, but she’s right, I mean, she gets it, nothing like a great party.” It’s the dinner hour, though no bells chime on this campus, and only two of us have actually heard Big Ben, have ever strolled through Regent’s Park, ridden on a red double-decker. But nobody around this table wonders why Septimus hurls himself out the window, nobody needs PTSD explained, and when Marita asks, “Wasn’t it Woolf who filled her pockets with stones and walked into a river?” nobody says “weird,” as two dozen heads bend over pages littered with post-its. I’m thinking how I want to say something, mend this rent in the air the way Clarissa gathers the raveled threads of her ripped dress with her needle, the way she draws everyone into her party, but already it’s time to pack up our pens, our notebooks, head out on the crowded interstate, past all the newly constructed buildings with no balconies, no wrought iron railings, these multiple stories of steel and glass, mirrored so no one can see into them.
(Originally published in Southern Review, 2009)
Light Pink Octagon
(Richard Tuttle, 1967, Canvas dyed with Tintex, Blanton Museum of Art)
Like nobody’s skin. Or skirt, blouse. Nobody’s flounce, neither ruffled nor scalloped, nobody’s ribboned basket. Or bonnet, or roses. No carnations, no half-sliced roast beside the wineglass, no ruddy cheek of a maid shouldering wheat, no dimpled buttocks of Venus or Bathsheba, no thundering Jehovah-splintered sunset, no velvet-tassled curtain, no fizzy drink. Not like skin, no veins traversing flesh, no one begging to be touched. I could move into this unadorned, open, plain-woven canvas, a pastel simplicity, an unclouded fabric billowing rugged as a mainsail uncurled, heading out to the wide ocean with the wind, this aerial cotton swath, unsplashed by any paint, uncluttered by any pen or brush, this unframed shape—arresting as a full breath.
(Originally published in The Georgia Review, 2008)
High Yellow
(Ellsworth Kelly, Oil on canvas, 1960, Blanton Museum of Art)
This is it. All you need. Though nothing resembles anything you know. It’s neither star nor flower, this imperfect oval more like a fat yellow cigar floating in blue so dark and bright it couldn’t be any sky that’s ever filled your breath. And the bottom third of the canvas: pure green. You don’t have to do a thing. Can stop the churning of your desire to turn this high-flying ovoid into an ear of corn or a squashed halo. This is only about color: yellow, blue, green. But your mind is still recalling that the first two can make the third. Like sun and sky make grass. You keep trying to put names on these three shapes, though they have nothing to do with names. Yet you can’t leave, for in the high sky above this bright lawn, a widening sun is about to drop the egg of itself into your lap.
Sunspots
Perfect, this orb, unblemished, constant, pure—unliked its fickle, pallid sister sphere that crooned, feckless, to love-starved cats, that pulled the tides of women’s wombs until they bled, flooding our sheets. No shadow-shapes of rabbits, vague contours of human faces. Clear and fat, an egg yolk clean of any slime, a gleaming round, Apollo’s lyre, logos— the lofty eye of God. No splotches on this realm. Yet ancient Chinese sages, medieval English monks, and later, Galileo saw what in the nineteenth century Schwabe and Carrington confirmed: a cyclic rage of solar flares, titanic tongues whose mass ejections hurl a billion tons of TNT our way, paralyzing satellites, slicing into messages, our cells.
(From Things of the Weather, Pudding House Press, 2009)
Solar System
Most stars in other nebulae occur in pairs, triplets, quadruplets, sex-. Not like our own sultan to this harem of planetary wives and countless asteroids, concubines. We nine (or eight?) revolve, trailing and unveiling our emerald, our topaz atmospheres, our eunuch-moons. But not so much polygamy as a case of astronomic solitude. A star alone without another of its kind. No one near who can reciprocate with equal flaring tongues while we, vague miasmic Venus and sweet malleable Earth, are constantly presenting the rounded colors of our curves, faces turned from the seraglio toward all this gaseous heat that spews atomic particles at whim, in which we bask and, agitated, spin.
(From Things of the Weather, Pudding House Press, 2009)
Lunar Eclipse, Alto-Stratus
Can’t see what we’ve heard we should be able to see, which is, after all, only invisibility, though they say that what is visible will slip by stages till what we often can’t see will be erased and we’ll be amazed as if someone has died who we never knew but thought we did, a glimpse of a shadowed surface once in a while, a faint gleam through a misted window, half-latched door—no hearty invitation, hand extended, no name, no curling smile.
(From Things of the Weather, Pudding House Press, 2009)
Thunder
To Descartes, one cloud falling onto another. To the Greeks, Zeus’s shield shaking, a forerunner of Hopkins’ shook foil, that grandeur, gathered and charged. For the native tribes of the plains, Thunderbird’s wings beating. Such magnified oscillations are beyond us, yet the very air we breathe is grumbling, a succession of compressions, negative and positive ions colliding, as someone in the next room is about to explode.
(From Things of the Weather, Pudding House Press, 2009)
Waning Gibbous Moon
Froth of the full-opened wild carrot, folding its cup. Shimmer of rain fallen on the street, our need to say goodnight, goodnight, friends we may not see again. A second of silence after the aria’s crescendo. The moment you slip outside of me and we begin the drift to separate sides of the wide bed before one of us rises to let down the blind, feel our way in the dark.
(From Things of the Weather, Pudding House Press, 2009)
Sunset, Crescent, with Venus at Greatest Eastern Elongation
A whisper touch, your lips across my wrist, and there, up there, surrounding us, a violet calm, a gauze contentment, and a sliver of light—slim canoe—suspended on the float of lavender, mauve, pastel haze through which this single disk of light off to the side gleams down to the fading—almost colorless—green of the lawn where rain lilies lift their petaled whiteness, as many lilies nibbling at the coming dark down here as stars.
(From Things of the Weather, Pudding House Press, 2009)
Waxing Gibbous Moon
This humped asymmetry, as if the scissors slipped, a segment missing in the arc. We’re waiting for the song’s last notes to be resolved. Yet here beside me, your face in profile is still your face, the whole of it, which I can never grasp, even between my hands, all at once.
(From Things of the Weather, Pudding House Press, 2009)
