Jeanne Murray Walker
Jeanne Murray Walker Poems
Like Gorky, I sometimes follow my doubts
outside to the yard and question the sky,
longing to have the fight settled, thinking
...
This tiny ruin in my eye, small
flaw in the fabric, little speck
of blood in the egg, deep chip
...
was going well. A perfect, rosy sow,
a finch, an elephant. Then a giraffe
at the last minute, spring up like Wow,
...
This is what our wandering life has come to.
Our dead stay where they're put, in different states.
We buried her beside the Texan, who
...
Sometimes I lose you. Say you are a puppy
and I've left the door ajar. Or I'm due someplace
and can't remember where. In my sticky-uppy
...
When the concertmaster gestures to the oboe,
silence flutters through the massive hall.
...
Because we both heard separately the bark
of the hungry storm last night- he there, me here-
the wind tossing itself through the dark
...
For a hundred miles
the fields have worn
beards of ugly stubble
and night is falling
...
Driving this morning, a poem came to me,
so simple, so pure Keats himself could not conceive it,
and then, turning onto Lombard Street, I lost it.
...
Letters, be the memory of this moment,
Ruth's 3-legged Golden Lab
sniffing for news beneath the hedge,
...
The angel speeding down the runway pulls up
her wing flaps, and, wouldn't you know it, wobbles,
then dribbles to a stop. She stands on the windy
...
We stand there in our vestibule, me clutching
my car keys, you, your suitcase,
me about to recite the names of apples,
...
For years now I have heard the cracking of my memory,
reluctantly falling apart like an ancient building.
At first a little cement dust,
...
It was years before I grasped how if I wrote it,
no one would believe me, how the phone rang
as I was getting dressed, as I was listening
...
Suppose you're blind, and so you can't see
the broken necklace of geese sailing the sky,
...
All night the caution light blinks
in the mountains. Through the wilds
of Pennsylvania in the blueblack night,
...
I open the locked chest of your death
and inside find mine, and others,
like Russian dolls, smaller, till the deaths
...
A loud wind haggles with the leaves
as I drive at 70 mph, veering from
a bundle that lies windblown on
...
Wood smoke drifts across the meadow
from a cabin. Against its shingled side
a hoe reclines, a weed tangled in its tooth.
...
you who could not sit still? They've
changed your sheets, unplugged
the medical devices, (unseemly in a poem
...
Jeanne Murray Walker Biography
Jeanne Murray Walker (born May 27, 1944) is an American poet and playwright. Jeanne Murray was born on May 27, 1944 in Parkers Prairie, Minnesota, the daughter of John Gerald and Erna Murray.[1] In 1965, she won the Atlantic Monthly Award for both fiction and Poetry and was named the Atlantic Monthly Scholar at Bread Loaf School of English.[2] She graduated from Wheaton College in Illinois with a B.A. in English in 1966. In 1969 she received an M.A. from Loyola University, and in 1974, she was granted a Ph.D. in English from The University of Pennsylvania. Walker’s poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Image, The Atlantic Monthly, Best American Poetry and many other journals. Her plays have been staged across the United States and in London. Among her awards are an NEA Fellowship, an Atlantic Monthly Fellowship, and a Pew Fellowship in The Arts. In 2005 she hosted a documentary about poetry in Pennsylvania, which was broadcast and rebroadcast on television and the web. A selection from her “Aunt Joe Poems” was featured on buses and trains with the Poetry in Motion project. A Professor of English at The University of Delaware, Jeanne also teaches in the Seattle Pacific Low Residency MFA Program. Walker, the mother of two children and three grandchildren, is married to E. Daniel Larkin III, and lives in Merion Station, Pennsylvania.)
The Best Poem Of Jeanne Murray Walker
Staying Power
Like Gorky, I sometimes follow my doubts
outside to the yard and question the sky,
longing to have the fight settled, thinking
I can't go on like this, and finally I say
all right, it is improbable, all right, there
is no God. And then as if I'm focusing
a magnifying glass on dry leaves, God blazes up.
It's the attention, maybe, to what isn't there
that makes the emptiness flare like a forest fire
until I have to spend the afternoon dragging
the hose to put the smoldering thing out.
Even on an ordinary day when a friend calls,
tells me they've found melanoma,
complains that the hospital is cold, I say God.
God, I say as my heart turns inside out.
Pick up any language by the scruff of its neck,
wipe its face, set it down on the lawn,
and I bet it will toddle right into the godfire
again, which—though they say it doesn't
exist—can send you straight to the burn unit.
Oh, we have only so many words to think with.
Say God's not fire, say anything, say God's
a phone, maybe. You know you didn't order a phone,
but there it is. It rings. You don't know who it could be.
You don't want to talk, so you pull out
the plug. It rings. You smash it with a hammer
till it bleeds springs and coils and clobbery
metal bits. It rings again. You pick it up
and a voice you love whispers hello.
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