Verse Wisconsin 105| Valerie Wohlfeld

Reprieve

My ankle is weak, I’ve bought
a special strap to shore it up.
My heart is scrappy and self-taught:
its wild tom-tom beats I cannot lock up.

The doctor hears a whisper and a shudder:
some hearts sad as last year’s advent
calendar, the little tabs won’t lock again, or flutter.
The pulse is ordered like the emptied-echoed convent

halls. The doctor has his blades and blood.
Small reprieve: the ankle heals, the heart does not.
The rules of the Talmud and the rules of the Flood
move forward the plot. Contortionist, the heart is prone to knots.

What colors the blood and artery, like rubies and jade!
My ankle carries me even when my heart is afraid.

—Valerie Wohlfeld, Newburyport, MA

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Valerie Wohlfeld’s poetry book Woman with Wing Removed, was published October 2010 by Truman State University Press. Her first book Thinking the World Visible was chosen by James Dickey for the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. She has been widely published and anthologized.

I have heard it said that what makes a container useful is the empty space inside it. Form is like a vessel and a poem is like the shape-shifting water inside it, that fills itself to the perimeters of whatever holds it. When a potter sits down to the wheel, if the clay is not centered it wobbles from side to side. In choosing to use form, the poet searches for the invisible lock that allows the potter to pull up the symmetrical pot. Form defines and prunes the poem just as a gardener arranges roses upon a trellis, or espaliers the pear tree. One must tend a sonnet as dearly and ruthlessly as an ancient Chinese gardener clipping the roots and branches of the living bonsai tree. I believe that there is no real division among the formalists and those poets writing without form. One only has to read Walt Whitman to know that free verse is as beautiful and shapely as any formal poem. Likewise, John Berryman makes the case for blank verse. Even as the various blood types of A, B, AB and O can be distinguished from one another, they still all serve the same functions in keeping a body alive--poetry too, in whatever manner it manifests itself, serves to circulate and sustain the individual and collective breath.