Wendy S. Walters
Spark - Spring / Summer 2010

Wendy S. Walters is the author of Longer I Wait, More You Love Me (2009) and a chapbook, Birds of Los Angeles (2005), both published by Palm Press (Long Beach, CA).  Walters’ poetry has been recognized with residency fellowships from Breadloaf, MacDowell, Cave Canem and Yaddo, and her poems have recently appeared in Callaloo, HOW2, Natural Bridge, Seneca Review and the Yalobusha Review, among several others.  She has been a nominee for the Essay Prize and her lyric and personal essays have been published in Seneca Review, Seattle Review, and Harper’s Magazine.

I’ve known Wendy S. Walters since we met at the 2002 Cave Canem retreat. Like most people, I mistook her for someone who was quiet and shy, and a few years younger than her actual age. In the five years since that retreat, I’ve learned that when Wendy seems quiet, she’s studying you. When her demeanor is something we call shy, she’s turning 1000 revolutions in her head, and whatever her actual age, when she speaks, you forget the lovely veneer of her striking face and listend intently as though you have been fortunate enough to be audience to an elder. This is all fairly dramatic, and I can hear Wendy laugh at it. But her ability to step outside of her self and the situation at hand is part of what makes her gift of language, and dialogue, and essay, and aria that much more enjoyable. These days everyone wants to do something new and apply themselves to the disruption, to the interference, or as the catch phrase goes, to thinking outside the box. Wendy makes her own box and no one but she can see it until it’s fully realized on the page. Her collection Longer I Wait, More You Love Me and her Chapbook Birds of Los Angeles contain some of the most fearless and spectacular work I’ve read, and she creates this work not from a project that is either lyric or narrative or experiment, but simply of her own mind, beyond the auspices of genre or school. Wendy’s work reminds me of Borge’s story “The Aleph” where a man discovers the ‘intersection’ of all worlds in his basement. From the point of the Aleph, he can enter and see all things at once. Wendy is a writer who seems to see all things at once.

Idyll

A field of radishes and spinach to pause

while more of the harvest sags, as in fact,

does (  ) when wit no longer imitates youth

Oh this is the farm, the roar of the farm

The farm of second chances where every man

cuts down briar for pasture, burn stumps, digs

a suitable bed.  Men bear minor erections,

women practice holding their own stones

A white-rock road exaggerates these protections,

though no fruit or root grows this winter

Oh, this is the farm, the sharp eye of the farm

where no man’s hunger conspires for marriage,

no woman’s ardor tangles with roots

Limen

Two days longer than an eventual now comes

A flame to lessen all tourism, one truth is toil

Shame comes without a wrapper, wait for it—

Expect some hands to deliver the body lately

Now the wind spills onto my-my-my-my-my

Time glows over the street like a music-box din

Another as if why becomes when, where ever we go

This is how we do luck always—as if intentionally

Now time is the street, and days or weeks longer

Than lost, traveling makes the desire to travel

That body now, this body, this housecleaning

Sheds joy for a slip, for whomever else is an accident

This is how we do love for pleasure (the weather)

Of the weather, my showboat circumference

Kills mope flung from vacancy, a dirt road roam

Who would live with me, my moxie fiend in favor?

Explosions then dinosaurs accompanied my sum,

his arrival an execution by a steady hand, a tool

I would be cut for luck. Yes, by luck, predict we live

You Know

I am aware that bringing a poem down to earth is no small task, and I know a poem does not belong to anybody.  (As I write this, the poem is distracted by the zeal of hornets in the gazebo and walks into the garden.  First, it tosses its shoes in the fountain. Now the poem has fallen asleep and floated over the parking lot where the cars below are arranged in rows by color.  One red truck is jackknifed at the mouth of the driveway.) 

I am out of pockets.  And the poem, not naturally “accurate," must learn to comply with the calendar of the poet whose luck is only ever in the past.  Of course, this is not possible in every family.  I should have been a lawyer, the card reader told me last week after laying down the Tarot.  A poem in the deck promised I would fall, so I’ve been waiting for a cue to let go.  But a poem will lie to shed its own skin, and this is why I cannot leave it alone.