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Another Way with Wang Wei

No emptiness around here: across the street

     a backhoe clanking, beeping, the next-door neighbor’s

seven dogs at it again, shrill yaps mingled

     with baritone yowlings, 747s thundering overhead, and

you’re upstairs in your study, too far for me

     to hear your voice, but later, tonight, you’ll come down

and speak in your gentle tenor, and all

     other sounds will fade—as far as Wang Wei’s mountain.

Wendy Barker is the author of six full-length poetry collections, including One Blackbird at a Time (BkMk Press, 2015), which received the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry, and four chapbooks. A recipient of an NEA Fellowship, Barker is poet-in-residence and the Pearl Lewinn Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

About Wendy Barker

Themes

Anxiety

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More by this poet

What Surfaces

Another chip in the white enameled sink, only three years old. How

I've tried to keep it pristine, and yet—

stainless steel pots scrape it till the black

cast iron breaks through. What's below a surface gloss. Now the flesh

on my hands has grown so thin

the layers underneath show through,

rivery veins and knobby metacarpals. Knuckles like pebbles—like

Wendy Barker

2018

After Reading Baudelaire

With sky a tight-fitting cast-iron lid,
       humidity and temp ninety-eight, rain stalled
over the next county, I listen to Edith
       Piaf ’s “Non, je ne regrette rien,” her raunchy,
chutzpah-laden contralto almost
       convincing me she actually has no regrets,
though I sure do, have never eased
       the ache of leaving my baby boy with sitters
so I could keep on with grad school,
       how some nights I’d come home to a bundle
of shuddering sobs till I held him
       and nursed him, but now of course he’s grown,
a solid forty-one, and I’m proud as
       any proud mom can be