Keeping Even by Sheila Sanderson

Sheila Sanderson’s collection of poems, Keeping Even, unites two sides of the country that reside within one poet: Her upbringing in Kentucky and her life now in Arizona. Add to the two different landscapes the happenings of family and tragedy, wonder and memories and you have a collection that makes you yearn to solve your own life’s dichotomies. Sheila Sanderson’s poems have appeared places such as Alaska Quarterly Review, Atlanta Review, Cimarron Review, and more. Ms. Sanderson teaches American and World Literature courses and poetry workshops at Prescott College in Prescott, Arizona. Below I am happy to share a few poems:

High Desert Arizona

Like an old-timer
easy with hard luck
will roll up pantleg
and shirtsleeve
to show what
a snapped cable
or a black widow
can do,
the land here
bares its stories
about where wind
makes its rounds
on rock,
has taught ridgeline
junipers to twist;
about where water goes
by habit
and by fancy,
where water went
and changed its mind,
where a scrub oak
wanted so bad
for water,
it lay down on
its side and
cracked granite
to have it.

This poetic picture paints the stark desert landscape and describes a scene I have scene myself out in the desert: where plants are so eager for water they grown back down to the earth any way they can to collect more water for its own livelihood. I like this poem because it reminds me of my own hikes in the desert.

Spendthrift

Like gainsay, a word always to be looked up,
a word that might have liked
to have meant its opposite;
or hereafter, a word that might have liked
to have it both ways.

like my father who, come late spring,
spends everything he can put his hand to
and borrow against whatever he’s got left
and spends that.
He whistles while he works.

One year he filled the backyard with Volkswagens
and wouldn’t but one in seven run
when he got them,
had the six towed out to the house;
another year it was lawnmowers;
another, houd dogs.

This year,
old metal flake fishing boats,
three generations of motors.

A little fixing and she’ll run just
like a new one, or cut or hum good
as she ever did.
But she never does.

Like the good eating that can come
from an evening’s fishing for crappie,
of treeing a mess of coon, for that matter,
cooked up so to get the wild out.  

Only the good never comes
because come late fall, he’s spent,
the desire to see something fixed doesn’t fix.

Somehow the pay-out he loves
strings out into beyond flat busted.  
He’d just as soon let fish
go rotten on the stringer,
take his coons by the ringtails
and fling them in that field out yonder
as to clean them.

Because even something in the bring-home
misfires someday late fall,
and he’s seeing in all he loved,
what misfits he’s gathered,
who lays up in the bed then for months at a time
moaning his treasury.

who will not even go out to the mailbox,
who will not eat,
give up the ghost of a word or a dollar
for nothing or nobody,
like he’s saving himself up
for what swells in spring
while his boats founder with rainwater,
breed rust and mosquitos.

This poem fascinates me in regard to the human condition. I have relatives who I can picture acting like this poet’s father spending every dime they have on some scheme they have in mind that fails miserably every time. The relative who spends every dime they have as soon as they receive it. The relative who claims they’ll fix a bunch of this, that, and the other only never does. For me, this poem describes my own quirky family members only they are all rolled into one fascinating character: the poet’s father. I think all of us can relate to such a person being in our lives and I love reading and re-reading this poem.

The Future Arrives As Pneumonia

Now the end keeps its promise.
Now he will not make it to thirty.

Now he will drown
like farmhouses below the dam,

like bottomland inherited
and tended by grandfathers,

porches swept by grandmothers,
certain revered shade trees.

Drowning in his inheritance,
he says, grinning at the nurse

as he begins a backstroke
on the bed.

He confesses to doing what
the dying always do,

to dreaming the dead ones close,
and dreaming himself

a kid among them
who they took to what was

land between rivers
become land between lakes, 

and up to Devil’s Walking Stick,
the hill from where

they’d watched it flood
back in the forties.

They kept talking about the house
down there, the barn, he says,

and they kept pointing
into the water and he kept looking

down into the water
but couldn’t see any barn or house,

and none around anywhere.
Not a single solid structure.

Not a single solid structure,
he says,

arms stretched out
as if now he were floating.

As if now he were at home in water.

This poem makes me wonder who the poet is talking about. Brother? Husband? Mrs. Sanderson confirms this poem is about her husband. The reference to water and drowning triggers my own perception of what is happening. Where I work, we explain to family members that “the heart is drowning in fluid” if the diagnosis is congestive heart failure. I picture the loved one in the poem imitating the backstroke as a way to lighten up the subject of what is happening to his body consumed with pneumonia, the family gathered around trying to keep brave faces. It is a sad poem as the water consumes the minds of the entire family, the dream of water swallowing up and hiding everything that is real.

If you enjoyed this sample of poems, you may purchase a copy of Keeping Even by Sheila Sanderson for $10.74 on Amazon by using this link below:
http://www.amazon.com/Keeping-Even-Sheila-Sanderson/dp/1936205424

Thanks always for reading, please click in tomorrow for more Poems Found by Poet Hound…