THE TELLING, THE LISTENING, Catharine Clark-Sayles. Saint Julian Press, 2053 Cortlandt, Suite 200, Houston, Texas 77008, 2023, 52 pages, $18 paperback, http://www.saintjulianpress.com
In
The Telling, The Listening, physician poet Catharine Clark-Sayles bleeds
out lyrical narrative after lyrical narrative about delivering difficult news
to patients, searching for what to say and what to do in a world with no final
answers—only stories carried away from countless encounters at the intersection
of entropy, medical science, a doctor’s art of being present, and a poet’s art
of being present. But those stories—delivered in gripping, musical language—confront
readers with a child’s “bloodied rags of flesh…seen through the sniper scope,”
a “young man completely healthy until purple blotches / on his face doubled in
a week, lungs whited out,” “…the woman dying / in her eighty-ninth year—…there
was a boy— / I let him kiss me once, but then he hit me / and held me down….”
and doctors that collect patients’ pain and add it to their own, exposing
readers to both what Adrienne Rich calls the catastrophe found and the treasure
uncovered when one dives into the wreck. And in these waters, there are
no shallows. All dives expose deep wounds, whether in patients of war, AIDs, or
other malignancies, or in the doctors who treat them.
Poet
Clark-Sayles, unlike John in “Swimming with Sharks” has no trouble “writing
poems about I don’t know.” The poet tells of morning rounds where
doctors must never show weakness:
We are
taught that when you swim with sharks,
you must
never bleed, that enticing sweat of fear
will bring
an attack. Do not roll to show any soft
underbelly
of uncertainty if you want
advancement
in your field, stay silent and shift
to one
side, if pinned give an unrelated fact.
It will
take years to learn I don’t know.
Decades for
I am sorry.
The
book is organized into a sonata form, holding true to the first section as an
introduction of themes: telling real people’s stories of illness, death, and
dying (e.g. “What We Carry,” “Naming the Monster,” and “She Says Pneumonia,
But Not Too Bad”), the physician
learning to listen to patients in the midst of their difficulties, not able to
offer ultimate answers to life’s most difficult questions (e.g. “Naming the
Monster,” “What to Say” and “Reconstruction”), and nature as a solace (e.g.
“Hummingbird Feeder in October”):
The nectar
in my feeder may encourage
some to
stay when they should fly
to southern
climates where abundant
blooms will
feed them and no freeze will stop
the rapid
flutters of a tiny heart.
Put away
the bottle or agree to vigilance:
keep the
nectar filled and fresh no matter
darkness in
the morning, fatigue when it’s late,
rain and
cold that keeps me near the fire
when I’m
home after too many hours of clinic
caring for
infinite needs: the woman alone
as cancer
closes in, a mother locked in grief,
a man who
struggles to keep sober, the suicidal girl—
no way to
cut away pain, no cure in pills;
just
nectar-drops of hope, a sweetness of belief,
as I make
my hummingbird bargain.
A lesser poet would simply drop
some nature poems in-between the heavy ones, thinking only to write “off the
subject” as a distraction for both reader and poet. But Clark-Sayles not only
brings the narrative back to the business of illness and grief in the final two
stanzas, but she selects visceral, fresh images in the early lines of this poem
(as she does throughout the collection) that create both a clear perception of
the sensorial elements they convey (e.g. “nectar in my feeder [encouraging] /
some to stay when they should fly” and “the rapid flutters of a tiny heart”), but
that also apply to the bigger picture of what the human patients and their
families and their care-givers are going through.
The second
movement, titled “Red Silk,” develops themes introduced in section I into an
autobiographical collage centered around being physician and soldier at the
same time, enacting the tension between those roles with four pages of epithets
and stand-alone stanzas that utilize irony (“Even as we die, life calls
us to be a child again…”), story (Have you heard the old Irish tale that says
that bards / are made by killing a red bull, taking its skin / and sewing a man
inside? Left in darkness for three days / he emerges with the gift of poetry.
Or he goes mad.”), reportage (“In the Army, a silk camisole under / the
camouflage fatigues saved my life”), medical definition (“Persistent
allodynia, which is pain resulting from a non-painful / stimulus such as a
light touch, is a common characteristic of neuropathic pain…persists long after
the initiating even has resolved.), allegory (“I walked back to the
fork where Mystic and Scientist parted, / where Good Girl screamed ‘Fuck it’
and Poet sat down to wait.”), quotes (Sometimes too much of a good
thing / is wonderful. Mae West”), figure and figurative language (“The
masseuse sweeps her hands down my neck to the tender / muscles of my scapula,
says ‘You’ve been flying / hard, your wings are tired”’), and even cartoon reference
(“I love Road Runner with his sassy ‘beep-beep’ running / off cliffs, moving so
fast and with conviction that he keeps going / through air. And Wile E.,
following just fine until he looks down and believes in the fall so that he
does.”
This section ends
with the couplet: “It is hard to be depressed when you wear / red silk against
your skin.” The physician soldier uses the red silk to fight depression and
PTSD, and the poet uses it to provided much-needed relief from, without
glossing over, the seemingly endless case-history poems about injury, disease, grief
and death.
Section
III recapitulates the horrors of Section I, stressing matters even closer at
hand: the interiority of stress upon the physician who also can suffer from
PTSD and treating people close to the poet or who have gotten close, many times
written in formal or in nonce forms with craft elements borrowed from formal
poems. Here is the opening sonnet to the section, spoken to the poet’s husband:
Aubade
I
remember Sunday mornings when hospital rounds
started
late and I could awaken to the clock of sun
striped
across the bedroom wall—early light of May
a
rosy stain of color to your face, asleep,
worry
lines unfurled into a younger you
for
all the early silver to your hair, your lower lip
gentled,
waiting for my wake-up kiss.
But
I loved to watch you sleeping curled
against
my hip, sleepy murmured protest,
blanket-burrowed
resistance to the mirrored
dawn-light
blinkered in your eyes, pulling you
from
sleep to fractious day, I watched the return
of
creased discontent as you tucked away
the
boy so kissable and I took up my own armor for the day.
Clark-Sayles
has become a master of the lyrical narrative poem with this collection, and
“Aubade” is a fine example of the poet’s chops in writing narrative and lyric
in form. The volta that begins in line 9 with the resistance to waking turns,
in line 11, to the return of “discontent” in the patient and the taking up of
defenses by the physician. Other notable poems in this final section include,
among others, “The Drug Salesman Leaves a Bag of Fortune Cookies in the Break
Room,” (first lines of each stanza are fortunes and the remainder of the
stanzas are drug statistics and trivia), and “I Deliver Bad News.”
I Deliver Bad
News
from
the starch of my white armor
across
a moat of polished oak.
You
balance between an indrawn gasp
and
grunt of pain. Myself, I’d as soon
not
be here. I could drown
in
the terror on your face as you look
into
places I don’t want to go.
I’d
like to drop the news fast and cold,
close
this play on opening night and run.
We
might try this out as comedy—
The
good news: you are going to die,
but neither of us could wear the baggy pants.
My nervous actor
pleads Come on, kids
put on a show, things will work out swell.
Supporting hope against the odds is hard,
harder still to hold the silence,
the pleading of your need.
In The Telling, The Listening Catharine Clark-Sayles does not hold onto her silence, and her telling is a gift to both readers and writers of poetry—a model for clear and transparent narrative, filled with lyricism, mystery, and pathos.
Catharine Clark-Sayles is a physician who recently retired after forty years in practice. She completed her MFA in poetry and narrative medicine at Dominican University of California in 2019. Her first two books of poetry, One Breath and Lifeboat were published by Tebot Bach Press. A chapbook, Brats, was published by Finishing Line Press. She has had work published in many journals and anthologies and has been nominated for a Pushcart. Her fourth book, The Telling, The Listening will be available in October 2023 from Saint Julian Press.
Catharine Clark-Sayles will be a featured reader for the upcoming Sturgeon Moon Poetry Reading. Click HERE for the Facebook reading invitation.
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