Susan Okie’s
Woman at the Crossing, winner of the 2023 Off the Grid Poetry Prize, shows
the complexity of everyday living and the choices we make…or don’t. The Dresser
sees this in the book’s title poem where a doctor (yes, Susan Okie is a medical
doctor) examines a woman in pain, prescribes an x-ray, then departs in her car.
Stopped at a traffic light, the doctor notices a woman on the street with a
sign professing her pain—hungry, lost my job, three kids:
…
The
light changes and I
drive
on behind safety glass.
This
woman at the crossing:
desperate
soul, racketeer, both?
One
day I’ll park, walk back
to
speak with her.
In this
face-paced 21st century life, we are often haunted by things we do
not do as well as decisions we make sometimes too impulsively. In “Willy of
Kisumu, Kenya, 1992,” Okie lets Willy, a young street boy into her home to play
video games with her similarly aged sons. Willy makes her sons “uneasy” and her
boys ask her not to let Willy in again. Before he leaves, he says he will go
back to school if only Okie gives him money for books. She knows he sniffs glue
and most likely won’t go back to school but gives him money anyhow.
I
hand it over and he disappears. Next time,
perhaps, a new story, but the same questions
and
the eyes that freeze me, old as stars.
Other
instances that haunt permeate the collection. In “The Life of Secrets,” Okie
finds relatives that her family hoped to hide:
This
year, I found my tia-abuelas,
two
old ladies, Mexican half-sisters
of
my grandmother from a marriage
that
my gringo family tried to erase.
Their
house in Cuernavaca is filled
with
sunlight, saints, dark paintings.
In “My
Father in Mexico City, 1921,” the poet writes from the perspective of her
father as a six-year-old who, while waiting
for his lunch in the beautiful bird-filled courtyard of his home, witnesses his grandfather sneaking a woman
into the house:
Rapping
at the door. A shout: grandfather.
The
birds dart off. You keep still,
listen
to the rapid Spanish, catch a whiff
of
perfume. He crosses by the fountain
with
someone whose skirts rustle
as
her hurries her upstairs.
Occasionally,
what haunts also mystifies. The Dresser wonders whether “In Hades” is a
nightmare or something that actually happened. Here are excerpts:
I’ve
gone under.
My
thoughts dart
like
small blue fish.
It
isn’t safe
to
speak. I’ll be
sliced
open…
…
I
see a man—vast,
dark.
He pins
my
arms, wrestles me
to
the ground. I watch
myself
fall.
…
My
eyes are bandaged.
One
is torn inside…
Someone
unwraps them—
a
detective shows me
photos.
Men’s faces
swim
past.
…
“In Hades”
is preceded by “interior with Young Woman” which concerns a young woman who is
taken to a borrowed house by a man she doesn’t know well. When he comes on to
her, she “recoils” and becomes an abstract painting in the style of Picasso. “In
Hades” is followed by “A Doctor’s Eye: Thy Bed of Crimson Joy.” While the poem
concerns a recalcitrant patient who has been told that alcohol will speed his
death and it does in the most horrific way, what catches the Dresser’s
attention is the sub-title of this poem. Thy Bed of Crimson Joy comes
from this short poem by William Blake:
The
Sick Rose
O Rose, thou art sick:
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy;
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
Of course,
the sick rose can stand in for that patient who gets his mother to sneak in
beer and then has an incident where blood gushes from this throat and the
doctor attending him who must be an inexperienced medic cannot get any other
doctor to help because the man has flagrantly brought on his own death and cannot be healed. It
could also be a suggestive touchstone for the women in the two poems coming
before “A Doctor’s Eye”—these women who may have suffered some degree of
molestation.
In Woman
at the Crossing, finding a comfortable and safe place known as home is a recurring
theme in this collection. It manifests largely in section 4 which most often
concerns love and care for the environment and our place in the cosmos. The dramatic
cover art, “Cathedral Rock” by Walter Weiss (Okie’s husband), confirms the
importance of finding home on our planet. On this topic, the poem that
resonated the deepest for the Dresser—“Love’s Austere and Lonely Offices”—narrows
down to the love the poet had for her father who was plagued by some kind of
stomach ailment but who was working on “a musical about Odysseus, the man who
loved/ home but couldn’t seem to get there.” Section 4 is the only section of
the book prefaced by a quote. Section 4’s quote is “Never say you know the last
word about any human heart.” by Henry James. The heart weighs heavily and earnestly
in this carefully written and presented first full-length collection by Susan
Okie.