Border Crossings

Heather Dubrow

Using both traditional and free-verse forms in her poems, Dubrow explores her experiences in some of life’s “border crossings” — divorce, medical crisis, the loss of parents, menopause, accident and injury. She grapples with difficult “truths that smell like old vegetables,” emotional baggage “heavy as November evenings,” and insistent “memories [that] siren the dark.” Although some outcomes slip achingly beyond control and events “edg[e] ever closer to the border/Of the cliff I cannot fence,” Dubrow discovers in art a gift of containment. Ancient Islamic painters depict borders within borders, continuity within change. And Ding potters “caress and curve their winter darkness/Into black bowls slim as April mornings,/That hold night firm within their fragile rims.” Perhaps Dubrow’s poems could be likened to these admirable bowls, crafted not only for their art but also for their capacity to receive and hold what their maker must pour out.

Heather Dubrow, Tighe-Evans Professor and John Bascom Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the author of a chapbook entitled Transformation and Repetition and of a play,The Devil’s Paintbrush, which was produced by a community theater; her recent poems have appeared in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Southwest Review, and Prairie Schooner. She has also published five books of literary criticism and co-edited a collection of essays.

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Excerpt

Patient

Two of her clocks stopped
The week of the diagnosis.
“Avoid obvious symbolism,”
I would have chided my students.

She turns the clocks’ faces to the wall
But cheers lipstick on her own.
And as the devil inside her
Builds his Pandemonium
With columns of her bones,
She bargains all her shiny hair
To buy from him
One more
Sunny winter afternoon.