One of my favorite Michael Walls poems has a new title. Once called “Scars,” it’s been retitled “Naked” in his second volume of poems, Climbing an Unnamed Mountain, released last fall from Kelsay Books.
I would often share the poem when I taught a college creative writing class or in a poetry workshop for adults. Walls’s premise is a good one, and I heard deeply moving responses to this question: what scars do our bodies show and what’s the story behind each scar?
As many of Walls’s poems do, the concluding lines leave us with something more than a private anecdote:
Naked
Unclothed in an examining room,
sheet hanging across my shoulders,
I examine my scars, each a mark
of past pain. My oldest scar, hidden
from all but the most intimate of lovers.
Splotchy patches on my arm, almost
erased by time, a spot on my chest–
transparent as plastic, that turns red
in the sun– reminders of the day
my mother turned her back for a moment,
when I grabbed the handle of a pot
of boiling water and almost died
–a toddler’s accident while learning
to climb, a young mother learning
to live, tortured by guilt. The thin,
pale path from a surgeon’s scalpel,
made to repair my foot, crushed
by pieces of floorboard in a wrecked
car, a line turned wavy by shifting skin,
where a laser cut out squamous cells,
a jagged mark beside my eye left
by an elbow thrown in a playground
football game. Those others–tucked
in the corner of a secret closet–the ones
we gave each other with our tongues.
The closing line has an unexpected snap, enticing the reader to read the poem again. A good poem hooks you with its closing and Walls’s gesture does exactly that.
When I began this series of blogs on poetry, my intent was to rescue the act of poetry writing from the game of publishing. Publishing poetry—seriously, folks—is a game and for most people, we’ll sink more money into the game than we’ll get out of it. Instead, it’s the act of writing poetry that is more rewarding than publishing it—and it’s a life’s work. To me, each poem should deepen our experience with this too-brief earth visit among our fellow inhabitants.
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