Poem of the Week | August 19, 2024

“When I learn Catastrophically” by Martha Silano is our Poem of the Week.

Martha Silano‘s sixth book of poetry, This One We Call Ours, won the 2023 Blue Lynx Poetry Prize and will appear from Lynx House Press in June of 2024 as part of the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series. Previous books include Gravity Assist and Reckless Lovely, both from Saturnalia Books. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Paris Review, and elsewhere. Learn more at marthasilano.net.

When I learn Catastrophically

is an anagram of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
When I learn I probably have a couple years,
maybe (catastrophically) less, crossword puzzles
begin to feel meaningless, though not the pair
of mergansers, not the red cardinal of my heart.
The sky does all sorts of marvelously uncatastrophic
things that winter I shimmy between science
& song, between widgeons & windows, weather
& its invitation to walk. Walking, which becomes
my lose less, my less morsels, my lose smile
while more sore looms. Sometimes I wander
for hours, my mile pace over half an hour,
everyone passing the lady at dusk talking
to herself about looming rooms, soil lies, ire
& else. Chuckling about my mileage gone down
the toilet, I plant the rose of before, the oil of after.
As each breath elevates to miracle, I become
both more & less of who I’d been, increasingly
less concerned about the dishes in the sink,
more worried about the words in my notebooks,
all those unfinished poems. I remember the fear
of getting lost if I left the main trail. I remember
mole hills, actual mole hills, piles of salty roe,
mountains of limes. Catastrophically, it’s rare:
one in 500,000, but then I learned the odds
of being born: one in 42 billion, though not sure
how they calculate, or the chances of the cosmos
having just the right amount of force to not
break apart. Less smiles. More lose. Miser miles.
A sis & bro whom I’ll leave like a sinking island,
Ferdinandea, that submerged volcano in Sicily,
though let’s be real: I was more pen mole than lava,
more a looming annoyance than a bridge
to some continent. I’d wanted to be composted,
but it cost 9K to convert me to dirt, so I opted
for whatever was easiest to carry across state lines,
some of me beside my mother & father, bits of me
on San Juan Island, at Mason Lake & Seward Park,
where I’d wandered like a morose remorse,
a lore-less reel, a miser silo, a doddering crow.

Author’s Note

Way back when, my dear friend and fellow poet Kelli Russell Agodon introduced me to an anagram generator website. How cool is that? When I was diagnosed with ALS in November of 2023, I wondered what the anagrams of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis were. A few days later, I visited Anagrammer and typed it in. Once I had a list of words to work with, this poem just kind of wrote itself.