by Gail Rudd Entrekin
$15.95 from longshippress.com, your local bookstore or amazon.com.
Walking Each Other Home, Gail Rudd Entrekin’s sixth book of poems, is brave and unflinching as this accomplished poet accompanies her husband, traveling the terrain of terminal illness. No one who turned away, even for a moment, from the reality of suffering, could write these poems of love. She has instead embraced the suffering and the man and these resulting poems are ones of deep compassion and insights that surprise — not a cliché or dollop of sentimentality to be found.
Entrekin is one of the few poets who can write a spare line that moves as easily as water over polished rock to arrive like a sudden bloom of mountain lupine. And not just for the glory of it, but to ground us deeply in the rocky alpine soil of her journey.
It is the depth of this couple’s love that created this book, the willingness to go into and with their allotment of sorrow, rather than trying to escape it. It has touched the soft places in me which I did not know needed touching again until I read this wonderous book. It works as strongly for poetry lovers as for those contemplating or experiencing end-of-life issues, or indeed for anyone who needs its steadying faith in Life.
D. James Smith (Café Dissertation)
Poems
“Dance me to the end of love.”
Leonard Cohen
We see how the end is waving
like seagrass in the sky
its roundelay, its accordions
all the dying songbirds
flying up as you clap
your bruised and scarring hands
from the leafy cushions of your
chair, your unseeing eyes
that stay and stay and stay
you stooped and groping
for the bread I slide into
your hands before you
ask. The birds swooping
now to pluck it from the air.
Finality is calling you, singing your name
and I would let go now of your hand
pass you on to your next partner
let you enter her embrace as I
declared a thousand times that we
would never, I would never, but you
are only a thread, a whisper, soon
I must take my chances
with the vast and empty world
of unrecognizable song
I who always sing while
you hold me, the way we
move together, how will I sing
when you fly up with the birds
and leave me there with a song
too slow, too dark for dancing?
Wind
Here is the thing that nibbles at the bone
the thing you can’t recall not its sound
this tiny structure casting its shadow
of fog moving through the tunnels of the brain
making you feel in the dark for the name
you were just about to grab before it snuffled
away on silent feet and soon you come to common
words the thing you used last night to pluck
your eyebrows the thing we do when we
say we’re sorry you learn to circumvent
(the brain still cagey even in the thickening mist)
the way we go around the missing words
in circles as though we didn’t speak the language
and must gather many small words to stand
for the one perfect one we’ve lost
and now we cannot follow a simple trail
of words how to load an app how
to get from here to Susan’s house and now
this year more will be lost like holes
in the fabric of our created selves until
we are each a ragged scrap a fabric
flapping in the whatchamacallit:
fast moving air.