Bow Down
to the hospital bed, to the sleeper,his mouth open wideBow to breath uneven,to the deaf man on the curtain'sother side Bowto a fear of tight blankets—pills, needles, blood,buzzing ceiling, metallicglare Herein this processing center,clear fluids in plastictubes—Bow down to limbo'swhite light, quiet feetdown the hallpassing through
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- February 24, 2021
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From HEAVEN BENEATH by Anne Marie Macari, used by permission of Persea Books, Inc.
Copyright 2020 by Anne Marie Macari.
All rights reserved.
Anne Marie Macari is the author of five books of poems, including Red Deer, She Heads Into the Wilderness, and Ivory Cradle, which won the APR/Honickman first book prize, chosen by Robert Creeley. She co-edited, along with Carey Salerno, Lit From Inside: 40 Years of Poetry from Alice James Books, and her poems and essays have been widely published in magazines. She lives in New York City.
Walking through the landscape of loss, the poems in Heaven Beneath explore the illness of a parent and the parallel ongoing degradation and destruction of the planet and its creatures. Beneath “paved-over space,” in the deep currents of a river, or the shadows of great trees, there’s another world, there’s a heaven, unknowable, in the muck, alive and with us, not distant or abstract. Using music as an essential force, as the conductor, and meditating on the deep lyric, Anne Marie Macari's poem summon mystery, energy, and a longing to enter, to touch, our heaven beneath, to walk with loss, to give in to the whole, the complete.
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