Book of the Week

Slow Wreckage (Grayson Books 2024)

 by Barbara Crooker

 

 

 By Sharon Waller Knutson

 Once again Barbara Crooker has knocked it out of the park in her poetry collection apply titled, “Slow Wreckage” as she looks back at her life through the lens of a seventy something woman and realizes although her body is falling apart and she has lost people she loved she still has her memories.

 What impresses me about Barbara is that she is honest and accepting of life and even when her life and body is changing she just keeps going one step at a time.

“Slow Wreckage” is about aging, but it is more than that. It is about appreciating the life we had and still have and teaches us to keep living it no matter how old we are.

 I have chosen sample poems with stories that gave me hope and faith in the human spirit.

 

On Teaching Poetry Classes in My Old

Elementary School in Honor of Its 100th Anniversary

Yes, I know my mother isn’t there, as I walk up and down Main Street; she’s moved to a different zip code, the one with no returns. When I was twenty, I worked for the summer here at 12524, sorting mail in the morning, taking down the flag at night. If you were to look at Main Street, facing east, you’d see not much has changed since the 1900’s, except there’s no trolley now, and the street is paved. But I’m still hoping to see her, maybe in Stern’s department store, the one that carried summer cardigans. Or at the Busy Bee having a milk shake, frothy in the glass, the rest of it waiting in a cold aluminum tumbler on the side. I’m looking for her friend Winnie, whose mind left long before her body failed; she might be buying a card in Rabbit’s Pharmacy. Or for Marian, Ginger’s mother; she might be picking up dinner at Karl Ehmer meats or the Bogardus General Store. I’m looking for the deep shade of old trees, moss on the sidewalks, maple wings stuck on the noses of boys . . . Here is the Dutch Reformed church that served as a jail in the Revolution. Here’s the bend in the creek where we used to go swimming, the railroad tracks we crossed in winter to the frozen pond beyond. Here is the street where we went sledding; this is childhood’s end. But my mother’s not there, nor her friends, nor mine. All the shops have changed hands, been renamed. Only the mountains remain, row after row of every shade of green; women taking their ease and resting, after their long day’s work is finally done.

 

CAR HOP

 I was twenty, my last summer working at Patty’s Charcoal Drive-In, senior year in college coming up, and what on earth was I going to do next? I made seventy-five cents an hour, plus tips. All those shiny quarters. Some went down the throat of the jukebox—96 Tears, What Becomes of the Brokenhearted?, Reach Out / I’ll Be There. Most of them went to pay for my education, something my grandchildren will never understand, but still possible in the late sixties. What my father, child of immigrants, didn’t understand was why I didn’t get a job after high school—I was a girl, after all, who did I think I was? Who cared if I was second in my class, honors and advance placements, aced my Regents exams? At least I didn’t have to worry about the jungles of southeast Asia, like the boys in my class. But what was I going to do with this degree in English Literature and Art History? I was tired of waiting on cars full of boys going nowhere, catching that Last Train to Clarksville. The Stones were singing Paint it Black, and California Dreamin’ seemed as impossible as going to the moon. I was terrified that my father was right, and some endless office job was on the horizon: alphabetizing, filing; touch typing and steno skills, was that all I was good for? This empty parking lot, burger wrappers rattling the edges in the sticky August wind. The world  already shifting, but none of us knew it yet.

MIRROR

 

 Who is this woman in my mirror,
the one who looks like she's been
worked on by Rembrandt or Dürer?
Why are there mail sacks sagging under
her chin? Wasn't it just last week
I was doing my hair on rollers
the size of orange juice cans?
Why is my scalp, pink as an eraser,
showing through? What happened
to my snappy ponytail that switched
and danced when I cheered? I still feel fresh
as the first day of school, new plaid skirt,
box of sharpened crayons, pencils that no one
has written with yet. Why is this young man
from down the street shoveling my driveway?
Doesn't he know my shoulders have lifted
great burdens? Can't he see I've already hefted
huge shovelfuls of sorrows and stars?

MY ONLY TIME ON THE 6 PM NEWS
    for Darryl Dawkins, 1957-2015
    NBA great

He was not only the nicest person I’ve ever met, he was the best looking corpse I’ve ever seen. He was in my Zumba class held three times a week in a fire hall. This giant of a man standing head and shoulders above our group of middle-aged women. Stevie Wonder gave him his nickname: Chocolate Thunder. Some years ago, he took a box of Skittles to his tailor (he was so tall, his clothes had to be custom made), and asked for a suit in every color. They dressed him in the red one with all of his diamond and gold jewelry—stunning. We wore our gym clothes and went as a group, then went to a bar afterwards to tell Darryl stories. It was a sports bar, so the evening news came on all seven large screen TVs. We weren’t the celebrities—Larry Holmes, Billy Cunningham, the current Seventy-Sixers—so no one took our names, and the TV camera crew showed us from behind (most of our shirts or pants said ZUMBA). That was my only time on the evening news, and it was only my butt.

 

LOVE IN THESE DANGEROUS TIMES

Sitting across from you, glass
of wine in hand, I’m warmed by
the little gas fire, secure as I think
about the cave we’ll make when
we go upstairs: flannel sheets,
duvet of goose down. Tomorrow,
we will go out again in the dangerous
world, wearing face masks and gloves,
in search of produce and toilet paper,
trying to make our supplies stretch.
When we return, we’ll feel like heroes
in a quest saga, safely home. But nothing
and nowhere is safe, my love. So hold me
in the dark; let morning only be broken
by birdsong. Let us keep going, hand
in hand, even though we know
now it’s impossible.
 

WERE WE IN VENICE, OR WAS IT A DREAM?

 Did we see palazzos, villas, churches floating
on their own dreamy reflections, the material world
rendered immaterial? Bridges, domes, spires, roofs,
all illusory? No land, just water. Thomas Mann
called it half-fairy tale, half-tourist trap. Did we really ride
on water: vaporetti, gondole, traghetti? Eat squid
in its own ink, seppie al nero, and polenta, listen
to Vivaldi in an old church, stop to see the moon
rise over the Accademia Bridge? Eat two gelatos a day?
Take a boat in the laguna, flat rippleless dreamscape,
to an isola where they pulled molten glass like taffy,
swirling it into petals, garlands, millefiore? Or visit
Burano, fishermen’s cottages painted in an arcobaleno
pazzo: garish red, bilious green, screaming yellow,
electric blue the sky would be embarrassed to wear?
Nothing solid, not buildings but the doubles of buildings
shimmering on the canals. Each night on our hotel terrazza,
we had a Spritz, Aperol or Campari, garnished
with orange chunks, pineapple slices, cherries;
a libation and a daily fruit allowance all in one glass.
The sky is rubbed smooth, smudged with the pinks
and blues of an abstract pastel. I am wearing hand-blown
black earrings spangled with gold, the night sky in each 

 

IL PRANZO

 We arrive masked, but not for a ball,
a careful six feet apart.  Our hostess
has prepared lunch as if we were children
at a birthday party:  our names on plastic cups,
napkins, disposable tableware all in a sealed
baggie.  She brings out chips, wraps, fruit,
previously packaged, and pours our drinks:
Aperol spritzes, equal parts prosecco and bitter
aperitivo, sunset in a tumbler.  And suddenly,
we are no longer in Pennsylvania looking
at a field of waving soybeans, but on a terrazza
in Venice on the Canal Grande, where our drinks
come with a garnish of fruit so spectacular,
it could be a Carnevale float.  The water is turning
peach, aqua, citrus, the colors of Murano glass,
as the sun slowly sets.  Nearby, night is waiting
to shrug into a dark velvet dress, don her mask
of sequins and stars.

More about Barbara:

 https://stortellerpoetryreview.blogspot.com/2023/08/storyteller-of-week_25.html

 To buy the book:

 https://www.amazon.com/Slow-Wreckage-poems-Barbara-Crooker/dp/B0CSJTG8CZ