Zoom Rooms

The timeless and timely intersect in poems about our unique historical moment, from the prizewinning poet.

In Zoom Rooms, Mary Jo Salter considers the strangeness of our recent existence, together with the enduring constants in our lives.
 
The title poem, a series of sonnet-sized Zoom meetings—a classroom, a memorial service, an encounter with a new baby in the family—finds humor and pathos in our age of social distancing and technology-induced proximity. Salter shows too how imagination collapses time and space: in “Island Diaries,” the pragmatist Robinson Crusoe meets on the beach a shipwrecked dreamer from an earlier century, Shakespeare’s Prospero. Poems that meditate on objects—a silk blouse, a hot water bottle—address the human need to heal and console. Our paradoxically solitary but communal experiences find expression, too, in poems about art, from a Walker Evans photograph to a gilded Giotto altarpiece.
 
In these beautiful new poems, Salter directs us to moments we may otherwise miss, reminding us that alertness is itself a form of gratitude.
 "What I so admire about Salter’s work is that directness never comes at the expense of deep thought, nor does a baseline cheerfulness and willingness to be persuaded by life’s pleasure exist without acknowledgement of senselessness and strife . . . Salter captures how our experiences of beauty aren’t quite articulable and implicitly challenge our understanding of time's passing." —Maya C. Popa, Poetry Society of America ("The Poet's Nightstand")MARY JO SALTER is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of eight previous poetry collections and a children’s book, and is a co-editor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry. She lives in Baltimore.Part One

YOUR SESSION HAS TIMED OUT

due to inactivity.
Do you want to reboot
back to your nativity?

Too bad. You can’t go back.
Or forward, for that matter.
Remember running track,

dunking a basketball,
or, come to think of it, doing
anything at all?

Too bad. You can’t reboot.
In fact, the very terms
you use will soon be moot,

will take their downward spiral
like you to a black hole
while brave new words go viral—

assuming being “active”
or “inactive” is a thing
in the future. Or to “live.”

ORECCHIETTE

The trattoria crowd
is so loud we keep leaning
forward to be heard.

Again: “What did you say?”
he asks, cupping an ear.
“I’m having the orecchiette,”

I tell him—tripping there
the obedient neurons tracking
back to Apulia, where

my mother and I, hosted
by distant, just-met cousins,
were led to a wide bed

sprinkled with flower petals.
“In fact it wasn’t flowers”—
I’m warming to my tale—

“but pasta, ear-shaped, eggy,
handmade orecchiette
spread on the beds to dry.

Get it? Ear is orecchio.
Like the French for ear, oreille.
And like oreiller, pillow.”

Heaps of translated ears
sleeping at noon, then wakened
to feed me all these years

later—why be beholden
(given all I’ve forgotten)
to this little scene?

Italianness, for starters—
a pride in being related
to a place, like a first course—

but things that happened after
have been poured on like a sauce
and given it a stir.

All the delicious days
I’ve eaten, unrecorded,
all the poems and plays

on words I was too lazy
to set down, and are gone!
Nor am I yet ready

to tell even the patient
man who shares my pillow
why I’ve fallen silent.

“Looks really good,” I shout
at his lasagna while
thinking I should find out

which cousins are still alive . . .
It occurs to me: I am.
Do I catch a whiff

of courage off my plate
of orecchiette? A little
taste of what I should write?


CARLO CRIVELLI AND THE TREES

Playful, prolific, noted for
tableaux of bounty, he’d do a portrait
of a man’s face composed of fruit,
or picture his Madonnas under

garlands, bright as chandeliers,
of nearly three-D pickles, pears,
apples pecked by birds; then turn
even a gruesome Crucifixion

into a sort of game. Here: a
trompe-l’oeil in oil and tempera
replicates the look of wood on
a panel that is truly wooden,

in fact paints over knots to make
knots in the hard planes of the cross.
Real as a relic, the unique
tree on which one man-god dies

while mourners on both sides gaze up,
their tresses patterned like wood grain
again, the dry eyes in their deep-
lined faces weeping beads of sap,

and in that surfacing of sorrow
each arrested teardrop tough
as an acorn, as if there to sow
millennia of grief.

What excuse then for the lustrous
finish on the instrument
of torture set before that sparse
landscape? What could be meant

by the assorted grayish, spindly
background saplings, barely a leaf
(though it is spring) alive?
Should we write off existence simply

as a pale prequel to the tale
of afterlife? False question for
him, probably, inclined to honor
foremost his material,

which is to say the fresh-cut trees
splintered into delicate
paintbrushes, or hewn as flat
massive planks to soak up these

minerals and plants ground down
to the consistency of paints
that may, or may not, blossom in
the ways the maker wants.