Anne F. Walker : Five poems

 

 

the trailer and bringing it home

 

stark is the bare grass
the white from yellow grass
above lake baryessa    and the son’s friend
in the stark blue fast car
coming into the house at a distance
and staying
at a distance
stark is the blue blue sky
without cloud    the largest made lake
in california
stark is the divorce.  the division
of property.  stark are the fields of off white grass
this side of the lake and
that 

stark is the trailer cover blown off
before we hitch four wheels to six wheels
stark is the mouse that escaped miles down the road
and you saw its eyes bug and its fur oily from nesting in the generator
when it sped to the concrete parking lot of the outlet plaza
so far from the field in which all this rested for
almost two years 

stark are the miles of highway
pounding rolling falling away under all six tires and now four more 

stark is never seeing you before
this

  

 

The wick of my day has burned through.

 

Dipping sun on long grass gold,
and a few birds here and there.
People walking, walking dogs,
the dress-weather of early summer.
I left the table full of people I’ve known
for decades. Left conversations of different foods
and how the foods were made, and where the foods can be eaten and who eats the food and doesn’t eat the food and who makes the drinks and he doesn’t drink the drinks
and that one person who drank all the drinks
and then ended up in a van. All the conversations
and this road is gray
and the light is going
and where yellow lights flash there’s no one on the crosswalk except
       a rustling musicality of the all that flows
       peripherally ~

 

 

the sky makes us into her bed 
after Kimi Sugioka

 

 

the sky is making us into her bed

of tangerine sorbet cherry almost night and dawn

the shape of broad predator wings feather by feather. above one

who says this breath only makes me know all there is to lose

and the staggering I feel from that, that I can't protect him

from the all of that. And the woman stutters between bed and chair

and wants to have all the numbers line up like they did

like they did when she prepared taxes over forty years before this

this falling and this anger at not holding

onto thoughts that seem for a moment so true, true as a rock

and then she throws voice like a rock right at me when I stand close

just because I stand close, and because it's all collapsing

for her

the sky makes us into her bed 

of stories

 

 

sometimes it is simply the foot of anxiety off my throat that brings this joy

  

the wildflowers and wind in foxtails were perfect
i carried the words down the hillside, repeating them and changing them as i walk
through eucalyptus and around the turn that opens bronze to the city.
by the old palm tree that feels like home and like fireworks. 

a wind whistles up as sun sets.
             some talk about the rain tomorrow morning.
and still there is a rise and set and rise 
of it all so
close  

once the roof has become open rafters and the sky opens to rain.
memory wanders over the solid planks that hold warm water
and the rain patter(n)s above
wetting insulation
weeding toward walls and cracked plaster ceilings 

the world is strewn and littered like a redwood forest the trees and branches fallen (over the/a) creek after wind

 

 

Mudita

Depending on the time of year, I
would have been around eight,
maybe nine. It was about two years after we moved
from Berkeley to Toronto. I remember sitting
in the finished basement of the house we rented that second year, trying
to clear my mind. I remember the visual of lifting
through air of the room, the floors, through the kitchen
where my mum was standing
doing things with her hands,
and up through the attic
and further up.
And it scared me and I stopped.
And I'm not sure where I had got the idea to do that in the first place.

 

 

 

 

Anne F. Walker [photo credit: Misha Bruk] completed doctoral work in American Urban Poetics at the University of California, Berkeley, after beginning her poetry career in Toronto. The Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Creates, the Ontario Arts Council, and bpNichol Memorial Foundation honored her work with numerous grants. UC Berkeley twice awarded her poetry its Eisner Prize. Her sixth book of poetry, Ink and Ink and Flesh and Length, was shortlisted for the Sexton Poetry Prize as a manuscript, and published in 2025 (The Black Spring Press Group / Eyewear Publishing). Walker lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, teaching writing at San José State University.

Anne F. Walker : Process Note #35

The 'process notes' pieces were originally solicited by Maw Shein Win as addendum to her teaching particular poems and poetry collections for various workshops and classes. This process note and poems by Anne F. Walker are part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and her poetry classes at the University of San Francisco. Thanks for reading.

 

 

 

I started writing this book on the train between Emeryville and Toronto. I had a small sleeping compartment and spent most of my time in the lounge. I collected words from the world around me, my mind and memories. I conceived of all the words like mud pulling together, red mud on the lounge tables, with the sky overhead through curving windows, and world passing out to the side, so that I could then sculpt with it. It started with:

Beating Heart of the Track

 

Lights out through a tunnel, brief, unexpected. And back into light dry grassland. Repeat. Screen dims in sudden dark. Foothills before the Sierras. An old man with white skin and rosacea, skin that pulls back loose as he drinks beer in observation deck sun. That’s the beating heart of the track the small blond boy drawing points out his picture to the young blonde freckled mom, tired between two small children. My family used to camp in gold country. This train, next to this river. I have seen this track and train from the road and thought one day, maybe.

The idea of 100-words came to me through Lorna Cervantes. In relation to Alfred Arteaga we had talked about her Ciento: 100 100-Word Love Poems, and the idea of 100-word prose poems was in the literary air as I stepped on the train. It felt like the right form.

Before I left I had been to SFMOMA's “Edvard Munch: Between the Clock and the Bed” and saw several versions of “At the Deathbed,' created over decades. I was curious what happens when you revisit an image over the span of a life. On the train, as I collected the “mud” for the collection, I wanted to try using some poetry from my first book, Six Months’ Rent, and rework the imagery. One of these is situated in triangles and dimensions at Toronto’s three way junction at Dundas Street West and College:

Loosely Remember

 

The placement of streets, neighborhoods how they were, houses before renovation. Sidewalk before a pail of soapy water is poured. Loosely streetcar rails. (The frame and) everything (outside the frame) disappears then reappears (as inside disappears): (a street meeting two others in a triangle where everything veers) black wires against blue sky along angles of streetcar tracks, everything sunbaked (like ghost images spilling from a broadcast t.v. channel, a figure behind the glass) disappears then reappears (as a girl on the sidewalk leans on a blue bike squints to see into the chromed greasy-spoon that hasn’t changed in thirty-five years

The poem can be read inside the brackets, outside them, with both. The final bracketed phrase stays open because not everything closes.

Part of the project was to explore the journey from homes, the Bay Area, home of my early childhood, graduate education, and raising my son, teaching, and Toronto. I grew up in Toronto, was a teenager in its suburbs, explored downtown on public transit, worked in film after the Fine Arts undergrad in Toronto, lived downtown as a practicing writer, went through my pregnancy in the Annex and birth at Women’s College Hospital. Both places are home and felt the traveling between them was a fertile creative space.

 

“Good Use of Beautiful Light (on Clinton Street),” a nine-poem sequence, was a lot shorter when I first wrote it, but photographer Misha Bruk kept reading drafts and gently pushing me to explore deeper. It made for a poem texture I had not wrought before. I use the word wrought because it felt like working with iron, hot, intricate, difficult, with deep permanent/strong/differently-textured results. I titled it from his phrase “Good Use of Beautiful Light” and the location of the poem’s origin:

Coffee comes in like a drug after sleeping dawn to dusk, waking to the faint amber line. Outside the kitchen door. Traffic sound hovers, amplified wasps. Oval skull of winter trees like yellow dye in veins. Silhouette of a couple of large apartment buildings a couple of miles away. Gas blue flame heats a silver percolator in the dark. A world of stars and darkness, like electric snow in a black and white television, the prickly black tugging though cool linoleum floor to pull back under, into dream. Reading all of Orwell’s 1984 in one night, locked in the narrative.

When I came back from the travels, which included a poetry fellowship at the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing’s Summer Writers’ Conference, and I had started really focussing the collection into the form it wanted to take, I went to SFMOMA’s retrospective Robert Rauschenberg: Erasing the Rules. In it I saw the room containing his 1978 “Hiccups,” “a Solvent transfer and fabric with metal zippers on ninety-seven sheets of handmade paper.” It deepened my sense of what I wanted to do with Ink and Ink and Flesh and Length. I wanted to have all different shapes, colors, textures fly over and in multiple same-sized square boxes of the prose poem form.

Visual art and deep conversations supported the creation and editing of this Ink and Ink and Flesh and Length project that ended under the stars in the high Sierras:

Glutted on a Morning Rose

 

The sky is busy with shooting stars, the milky way, sound of running water. Several at a time, flashing red lights of west-bound cross-continent planes span the Sierras.  Last week I was on one, still sleeping.  Fitful.  Unaware of the huge chirping night below. The bottom of an ocean risen.  I can’t shut my eyes to it.

 

Moths or night-flies buzz around the lit tent. Trying to fan, to thump, to thump, into the glow of the solar lantern my beautiful son lent.  Like you, I too have been broken.  And put back together, light shining through so many seams.

 

 

 

 

 

Anne F. Walker completed doctoral work UC Berkeley after beginning her poetry career in Toronto. The Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Creates, the Ontario Arts Council, and bpNichol Memorial Foundation honored her work with numerous grants. UC Berkeley twice awarded her poetry the Eisner Prize. It supported her poetics with a President’s Dissertation-Year Fellowship and Mentored Research Award Fellowships. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, teaching writing at San José State University.

 

 

 

 

 

Maw Shein Win's most recent poetry collection is Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn) which was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for the PEN America Open Book Award, and shortlisted for CALIBA's Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA. Win's previous books include full-length poetry collection Invisible Gifts and two chapbooks, Ruins of a glittering palace and Score and Bone. Win often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers and her Process Note Series features poets on their process. She teaches in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco. Along with Dawn Angelicca Barcelona and Mary Volmer, she is a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse, a new literary community. Win’s full-length collection Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn) is forthcoming in Fall 2024. mawsheinwin.com