Sample Poems by Marjorie Maddox
Treacherous Driving
“It’s as safe as traveling to work . . . ”
— a cardiologist before performing
a transplant
The first night of the blizzard,
that stranger inched into Ohio.
Halfway through he skidded
into our snow-spackled lives.
His heart is buried
in my father,
who is buried.
This is the hole
in the stranger, in my
father, in my own
cracked chest, hail cupped in its cavity,
the aorta beginning to freeze.
All winter,
the weather preaches white
lies: fields blank of roads,
a curve straightened,
the even light of sky.
Tonight the breeze is all
icicles, banner-like
from the clouds. Nothing
is moveable
in this treacherous state.
Our wheels spin,
their rhythm: a breath
that pulls us
then stalls. The law
of the body, of the state,
cannot replace the chain
reaction, jackknifed lives,
hope piling into hope.
The man and his heart,
cold on an icy road,
warmed us for weeks
while winter, a clear blue thing,
wafted light.
Disconnected
“The heart has its own nervous system . . . [once transplanted, it]
can beat independently of the brain.”
— The Boston Globe
Magazine
Its nerves left dangling,
so many severed cords
uncoiled and floundering
about uninsulated space
I think—until a priest-turned-
surgeon explains in stops and shocks
the transubstantiation of transplants,
what others’ hearts were, are, continue to become
inside our opened hollows,
disconnected from used nerves
that bridge to blood.
Instead, this always-symbol,
always-physical of personage
completes itself, confidently connecting
to what it needs, its sinoatrial node
part of that separate
chambered system of someone else,
heart of the fact that keeps it still
believing what it does.
In the transplant waiting room,
a child asks her mother,
“Will Daddy love the same people?”
and I startle at the complications.
While the slow clock sterilizes
the lives of those waiting shock-still
or nervous-twitching,
I think, out-of-time, of persons whom I’ve become
on stage, transforming what I wasn’t into
what I wasn’t.
In seventh grade, the penalty for breaking
character in Theater class was failure.
And so we sat obediently as old women
but staring boldly, disconcertingly
back-and-forth at the blushing prop boy,
the unplugged cord, when,
in Arsenic and Old Lace,
the telephone kept ringing, ringing, ringing.
The Waiting Room
does not wait patiently
for us, its stucco walls vacant
of the pain we hang upon the gray
and graying we soon become. Between,
we pretend to plan a son’s
baptism, book revisions, a summer life that lives after
this. Your husband wants a liver;
I want a heart that breathes an average rhythm
within my father’s ribs. The others here
won’t fit into our tight, cramped list
of miracles and what we need
to get there. Behind our prayers:
the backdrop of another family winning
what they’ve lost, their stuttered cares,
the infection and rejection on our cross.
Landscape and Still Life
After the new heart, when blood
cultivated fungus in my father’s fingers,
began harvesting his legs,
pruning flesh from the rotting fruit
of what we were
once, we too withered, lost
the way to move
in the moving world.
What would he photograph
now? we asked, he who walked miles
to catch light in its pedestrian way.
When, without fingers, he focused his lens,
framed and balanced unruly compositions,
subjects sprouting onto film,
how would his body’s landscape separate
lights and darks, begin
again to develop?
Masked and scrubbed
in the half-light of intensive-care,
we study his absences,
the silhouette of appendages
lost, phantoms tucked neatly
beneath the photo-screen of sheets.
Obedient still-lives, we stay and stay
until he, too, is gone.