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Mary Jo Salter

Visiting Poet

Mary Jo Salter

Educated at Harvard and at Cambridge University, Mary Jo Salter is celebrated for her inventive uses of traditional forms and has received many awards, including a recent year in France on an Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship. Salter is author of four collections, Henry Purcell in Japan (1985), Unfinished Painting (the 1989 Lamont Selection for the year’s most distinguished second volume of poetry), Sunday Skaters (1994), and A Kiss in Space (1999), as well as a children’s book, The Moon Comes Home (1989). Carolyn Kizer wrote of A Kiss in Space: “These are poems of breath-taking elegance: in formal control, in intellectual subtlety, in learning lightly displayed.”

An editor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry and an Emily Dickinson Lecturer in Humanities at Mount Holyoke College, Salter lives in South Hadley, Massachusetts, with her husband, the writer Brad Leithauser, and their two daughters.

Select Poems

From up here, the insomniac

river turning in its bed

looks like a line somebody painted

so many years ago it’s hard

to believe it was ever liquid; a motorboat

winks in the sun and leaves a wake

that seals itself in an instant, like the crack

in a hardly broken heart.

And the little straight-faced houses

that with dignity bear the twin

burdens of being unique and all alike,

and the leaf-crammed valley like the plate

of days that kept on coming and I ate

though laced with poison: I can look

over them, from this distance, with an ache

instead of a blinding pain.

Sometimes, off my guard, I half-

remember what it was to be

half-mad: whole seasons gone; the fear

a stranger in the street might ask

the time; how feigning normality

became my single, bungled task.

What made me right again? I wouldn’t dare

to guess; was I let off

for good behavior? Praise

to whatever grace or power preserves

the living for living…Yet I see the square

down there, unmarked, where I would pace

endlessly, and as the river swerves

around it, wonder what portion of

love I’d relinquish to ensure

I’d never again risk drowning.

From A KISS IN SPACE (Alfred A. Knopf, 1999)

That autumn we walked and walked around the lake

as if around a clock whose hands swept time

and again back to the hour we’d started from,

that high noon in midsummer years before

when I in white had marched straight to my place

beside you and was married and your face

held in it all the hours I hoped to live.

Now, as we talked in circles, grim, accusing,

we watched the green trees turning and losing

one by one every leaf, those bleeding hearts.

And when they all had fallen, to be trod

and crumbled underfoot, when flaming red

had dulled again to dun, to ash, to air,

when we had seen the other’s hurts perfected

and magnified like barren boughs reflected

upside-down in water, then the clouds

massed overhead and muffled us in snow,

answered the rippling lake and stopped the O

of its nightmare scream, The pantomime

went on all winter, nights without a word

or thoughts to fit one, days when all we heard

was the ticking crunch of snowboots on the track

around the lake, the clock we thought we either

were winding up or running down or neither.

Spring came unexpected. We thought the cold

might last forever, or that despite the thaw

nothing would grow again from us;

foresaw no butter-yellow buds, no birds, no path

outward into a seasoned innocence.

When the circle broke at last it wasn’t silence

or speech that helped us, neither faith nor will

nor anything that people do at all;

love made us green for no sure cause on earth

and grew, like our children, from a miracle.

From SUNDAY SKATERS (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994)

(Nicolaes Maes)

It’s all

an elaborate pun:

the red peel of ribbon

twisted tightly around the bun

at the crown of her apple-

round head;

the ribbon coming loose in the real

apple-peel she allows to dangle

from her lifted hand; the table

on which a basket of red

apples

waits to be turned into more

white-fleshed apples in a water-

filled pail on the floor;

her apron that fills and falls

empty,

a lapful of apples piling on

like the apron itself, the napkin,

the hems of her skirts–each a skin

layered over her heart, just as he

who has

painted her at her knife

paints the brush that puts life

in her, apple of his eye: if

there’s anything on earth but this

unbroken

concentration, this spiral

of making while unmaking while

the world goes round, neither the girl

nor he has yet looked up, or spoken.

From SUNDAY SKATERS (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994)

About Mary Jo

Poetry Center Reading Dates: April 2001