Six Poems
by Martha Silano
When I’m on the Bed
called death, I hope
to be thinking about
the texture of the bucatini
at Campiello, how they seated us
in the bar by the pizza cooks, but when we asked to sit elsewhere
they put us beside
a giant strangler fig
with fake orchids we thought were real.
Al dente, which I pronounced al Dante, in honor of my nephew,
in honor of the circles of hell, my heritage. When I’m on the bed called death
I hope I recall your smile that evening
when you learned budino means pudding,
a butterscotch pudding, which we more than managed
despite finishing our entrées. In la stanza della morte, shoving off
my mortal foil, may I be dreaming of butterscotch pudding, the feel of my hand
on your back, recalling the call you made
from a mile down the beach to tell me there were no
yellow hilly hoop hoops, greater cheena reenas, or froo froo stilts.
I walk back to the car while you call again, this time to tell me you found
a flock of dunlins and semipalmated sandpipers. There’s an actual flush toilet
at the parking lot! And potable water! And my love calls again,
this time to say he’s nearing the path to the parking lot. No, I don’t have
the keys to the car or a single coin, but I’ve got water, binoculars, and my phone,
a little notebook to write down the species—tricolored heron, royal tern, wood stork—
which I’ll add to my list of what to think about when I’m on my giant bucatini platter of a bed.
How to Fall
Prioritize not bashing your noggin—that makes good sense
cuz hitting it could be deadly. You don’t want
a secret bleed inside that
sweet skull of yours, right? If it looks like you’re taking it
from the top, for God’s sake turn your head
to one side. Aim to teeter sidelong,
not onto your back, which can really mess you up. Also,
it’s a good idea, as you careen, to make
like a twirly bird. As the Bible
and the Byrds song say: Turn! Turn! Turn! There is a season
for running without tripping, and then there’s
loose carpets, a backpack left in the middle
of the floor. Jeez, kids, please don’t drop your slides
in the path from the kitchen to the front door—
do you want your mother
to break her arms and wrists? It says stay loose. I get it,
but isn’t it hard to relax when you’ve tripped,
don’t know what’s happened
or how it will end? A website suggests rolling out of it,
I guess like you’re playing in the surf, in and out
of waves that never slap or hurt.
It’s like they think we have complete control of our tumbles,
our foibles, our faults, but the question is: do we?
Spread out the impact is another tip.
I think this means the love of family and friends, an Olympic-size pool
of folks who bring you chocolate pudding, homemade soy milk,
potato-leek soup. What you want
is a squatting position, legs over your head,
a great deal of momentum from this life
into the next.
Elegy with Exhaust Fan and Robin Song at Dusk
Now that The War to End All Wars is a slug in the compost bin of history,
I’m never going to say a batch of fudge brownies is done, even when
the knife stuck into the middle comes out clean.
After I’ve vanished, I’ll get a new hairdo—a pageboy or a bob.
After I’ve swum past August’s dry moss, after my eyebrows
cascade past my collarbones, I’ll rename myself
Apostrophe, possessor of bends in the trail. Wear my cutoffs
like a pair of bricks, sink into the intimate ground.
When I disappear, I’ll no longer collaborate
with the house finches but hitch my trailer to a gust. It turns out all this time
I’d been hiding in a patch of pentstemon, which meant the moon to me.
I could lift my head, listen to the ruckus of hummingbirds,
never imagining I’d be banished from London and Paris,
all the towns in between. It was like a flame
in a campfire igniting from an ember,
tumbling in the wind, a flame that set an entire valley
on fire. A flame I know
I can’t put out.
If We Didn’t Leave the Task to Backhoes
The weather is a bright and obvious song. It’s noon before you realize
you’ve spent three hours freshening the herb pots,
feeding the ornamentals Miracle-Gro,
listening to a towhee, its wacky, off-kilter song, deciding it’s time
to dig a giant hole for a root-bound hydrangea.
The earth is stubborn, doesn’t want
to be messed with, so you change from sandals to sneakers,
put your full weight onto the shovel’s rim
as your mind wanders to the uncle,
cousins, and brothers who took turns digging your mother’s grave.
Talk about a cross-cultural experience! Anyone digging
anyone’s grave. A task that has united,
would continue to unite, if we didn’t leave the task to backhoes.
The expression: digging your own grave.
Freedictionary.com says
it’s being responsible for your own ruin. When your son
was young, you took him to a Day of the Dead exhibit
at the Burke Museum. Sugar skulls,
all order of marigolds. Dioramas of cultural practices from around the world.
One about a society requiring its men to dig their own graves.
Not prisoners of the Nazis or ISIS,
just a guy in a country where part of the deal is to foster a clear sense
of one’s future, regardless of being one’s worst enemy,
of shooting oneself in the foot.
Twenty minutes to dig a one-foot hole. A feeling of victory
when the plant fits perfectly, and I tamp the dirt
into place.
Mistakes Were Made
The weather app said the wind was from the south and west.
It was from the north and east.
The sinus doctor said it’s your brain. Maybe you had a stroke in your sleep.
It was a benign nodule in one of my lymph nodes.
The pan said nonstick.
The fried egg stuck.
Another doctor ordered a swallow test. I chewed a cracker
mixed with barium, learned my right vocal cord was weak.
I went out on a boat. A muscle spasm in my torso roiled
like the surf. When I googled my symptoms,
I found ALS. When a friend said Stop it, you can’t
diagnose yourself,I figured she was right.
All the testing. All the tests. The doctor who said
If I were in Vegas, I’d bet it was all due
to stress. The last stop was the eighth floor,
Neurology.They looked at my tongue,
asked me to spit in a tube to be sent off to a lab
where they’d check to see if it was inherited.
The weather report said sun, sun, sun.
It rained.
Death Poem
Death is the one-day-alive mayfly clinging to a watering can.
When the grass turns brown, how can I not think of death?
In my heart, death lives like a mama raccoon with her two young.
We haven’t figured out a way to undo death.
Death awaits the pigeon on a roof, says the Cooper’s hawk.
It’s not cool to mention corpse beetles when there’s a death.
Did you know there’s a death’s head hawkmoth?
A scrub jay squawks death, death, death!
Dragonflies and death: they live about six months.
Eating is for sure some kind of elaborate death feast.
Sometimes death is invisible, especially when we laugh.
Our planet: one big tribute concert to death.
Death be not proud, says John Donne, but death is proud, I think.
Everything ends up being an ode to death.
Martha Silano’s forthcoming poetry collections include Terminal Surreal (Acre Books, 2025) and Last Train to Paradise: New and Selected Poems (Saturnalia Books, 2025). Her most recent release is This One We Call Ours, winner of the 2023 Blue Lynx Prize (Lynx House Press, 2024). She is also the author of Gravity Assist, Reckless Lovely, and The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, all from Saturnalia Books. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, and in many anthologies. Awards include North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize and The Cincinnati Review’s Robert and Adele Schiff Poetry Prize. Her website is available at marthasilano.net.