Live Encounters Poetry & Writing March 2025
Stray, poems by Sandy Solomon.
Stray
Open wounds on his legs, his flank, his snout.
Infected, starved, too weak even to move
when the man lifts him from the highway’s verge
where someone dumped him, wrapped in a dirty blanket.
For weeks, he’s bandaged, bedded down, fed
by tube. Too weak, too much in pain to eat.
You’d think they’d put him down. Instead, the humans
croon as they clean his sores and cover his body.
But over many weeks, like a film run backwards,
from no movement, he moves. Now he’s lapping
water or eating kibble; now he lifts
his head to look, his ribs disappearing
in flesh, coat filling out, the lesson
of recovery condensed clearly in his body.
A month in, we watch him work to stand,
back legs held, trembling, and then failing.
We watch him work to walk and later run,
his helpers propping him up, urging him on.
I watch out of some radical need
for rescue: his disused voice, gruffly sounding.
Note
At a presentation on essential oils
The speaker for today’s talk discusses smell.
He says he’ll ask his audience to tell
from cards he’s infused, each with a different oil,
what associations those scents evoke.
Aroma, he says, has notes, high and low.
I tune him out to ponder sound yoked
to smell, sense defining sense. My mind
locates smells like the bright, high ī in kind,
almost too sharp, a pang of cheesy rind.
Then smells that conjure up the long ō;
that deeper musk in soil, wobble in the throat,
lament almost, the heart’s bumbling Oh.
I’m back when he holds a card for me to sniff
that carries in its highs my mother’s scent, the whiff
of rare evenings out in a stir of stiff-
crinolined skirts as she paused to say
goodnight; and we children stopped our casual play
to stare her out, her strange, lip-sticked sway
infused in rose geranium, I learn
today. He smiles. In her wake, the waves churn
at childhood’s dock and pass. I see her turn,
no years now to weigh her down. Shadows—
all hurt and difficulty blurred. Echo’s
echo. Beneath salt breeze, that earthly nose.
Plunge
Get out, I say. Like, Go on. Tell me another.
You don’t say. But you do, and we’re laughing,
that silly laughter that takes over the room,
as when, running a long race, the lungs crush.
Breathing’s a bastard, a bitch. Come on. Come on.
Trying it on like tomorrow. Like no tomorrow.
Are you weeping? My first loyalty is to tears,
no matter how I come upon them.
Fall into laughter as into a warm pool.
Body under, head under, eyes closed.
Treading the moment. Not helpless, but like helpless.
Hang onto your arm to hold myself down.
Walk
Down the disused road the dog and I
took a last walk together; we stepped
into our shadows, stretched straight before us
that afternoon, grey, slightly lumpy
shapes that spilled forward. The cracked asphalt
crossed with branched shadow from the bare
boughs above. We breathed damp vegetal
smells where snow melted along the verges.
The thaw, the light, the air’s brisk currents,
something promised spring, or winter’s end.
The dog stopped and stopped to nose ground,
its scent released from freeze—days and days
of doggy traces now warmed and freed to smell.
I waited, moved, waited again, watching
over his wasted frame, the matted neck
a mass of bones, as he bent; our shadows waited
as well, mine massive, his small.
He was just a dog. I knew—present,
cocked—like my thumb’s curl around the leash,
the irritation I’d sometimes felt when
he rolled in smells or chewed cow plops.
But then, no matter what, he’d waited for me
nights, keeping weary watch until,
at last, I’d climb the stairs; he’d greeted mornings;
he’d run circles round me in what looked like joy
at open sky or a meal; he’d looked out.
Now he slowed and slowed again, wanting
rest, wanting home, and when I turned
back, he quickened his pace. Our shadows, longer
yet, fell in behind each hard-cast step.
War
His broad hands, their muscular grip,
and all their rage,
which he and I knew
as passion. How helpless we were together
in that Chicago room,
strained gray light
from the airshaft even when the sun shone,
our bodies resting under the wrinkled sheets
curled and overlapping.
Beside his bed, bottles
of pills he took to bring on sleep or blunt
nightmares, pills prescribed
when, back from Viet Nam,
he began to study history again.
The army pegged him as literate and kind
so it gave him the job
of writing from base camp:
Your son, Brian, didn’t suffer at the end.
I enclose his personal
effects—letters, photos,
his high school ring—and send the Company’s
sympathy for your loss. His fellow soldiers
loved him. Or so I’ve imagined
the note. I know he’d sit
at his typewriter to peck at the o’s and y’s.
Fiction sometimes, he said.
The kid had cried and bled out,
rescuers under fire, unable to reach him.
But for the bereaved, the lie about sudden,
unsuffering peace
must have helped as they
imagined their boy down and close to death.
Sometimes my friend wrote
fictions of another sort,
as he squared the soldier’s lies, lover and wife.
Perfect job for a historian who had to find,
absent living witnesses,
the truth from scraps of paper.
But the job conditions! What hurt, he said, wasn’t
the story of a soldier’s death
but the facts, the body bags
dropped in the corner of his room for him to search
for snapshots or last letters, for tokens
or locks of hair,
the soldier’s keepsakes.
What hurt, he said, was the red-raw, open-
handed, slack-jawed,
shot-up, bloody
vacancy, the waste, which wormed in his mind,
knocked him back when he searched their pockets for clues
about a life now gone.
As he sat alone
in the forward base at his desk to compose his bland,
comforting notes,
his feelings shook the fingers
that were searching for the right key, the words.
In Chicago, in sleep, sometimes he shouted, sometimes
twitched; mostly the war
hid silently,
wearing his gentle mask, his civilian clothes.
But, it showed itself
when he held my body
in his broad hands. Then it joined us, grew
articulate in gesture, seemed to rise
from elsewhere, from a moon-crossed
night of stars and rockets
in Da Nang; from those careful, nuanced letters
to say, to say, to say….
And after, ever after,
from those empty, blasted eyes.
© Sandy Solomon
Sandy Solomon’s book, Pears, Lake, Sun, which received the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press, was published simultaneously in the UK by Peterloo Poets. Her work has appeared in journals in the US and the UK—most recently, in The New Yorker, Plume, Scientific American, Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, and Hopkins Review. And, also, in such journals as New Republic, Poetry Review (UK), Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. Two of her poems have just appeared in A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker, 1925 to 2025, an anthology drawn from more than 13,500 poems published by the magazine since its first issue. She lives in Nashville (she has taught in Vanderbilt University’s Creative Writing Program) and spends part of each year in the UK where her English historian partner does his research.