Hearing Test
Once I dreaded you,
all I could not hear,
the long pauses indicating failure.
But inside the grey padded booth,
I am amphibious,
my chambered heart thudding
as I listen to a symphony of sonar:
small beeps,
far away trumpets and bumps,
some imagined, most not.
I listen as hard to what I hear
as I did when a child at Scarborough Beach,
lying with ear to sand
that I knew was full of sea water,
all I loved and dreaded most.
In a world muted between beach and breeze,
I heard a whale call miles beyond the undertow.
I sensed his questing eye,
his barnacled heft
a citizen of the maplessness
where I have always longed to live,
in the country without test,
that of Ysma’el, meaning
“God harkens, listens.”
Once I dreaded you,
all I could not hear,
the long pauses indicating failure.
But inside the grey padded booth,
I am amphibious,
my chambered heart thudding
as I listen to a symphony of sonar:
small beeps,
far away trumpets and bumps,
some imagined, most not.
I listen as hard to what I hear
as I did when a child at Scarborough Beach,
lying with ear to sand
that I knew was full of sea water,
all I loved and dreaded most.
In a world muted between beach and breeze,
I heard a whale call miles beyond the undertow.
I sensed his questing eye,
his barnacled heft
a citizen of the maplessness
where I have always longed to live,
in the country without test,
that of Ysma’el, meaning
“God harkens, listens.”
Everything Far Becomes Near is a newly released chapbook of autobiographical poems which center on hearing, silence and deafness. Originally, I thought I would write about the experience of hearing loss, but it turned into far more. The poems, which are in four sections, encompass the silence of the past, of the dead, of the voiceless, of the ineffable no matter how it is defined. The silence of today when so often we do not hear each other. The silence of love. The book is available through Amazon, Barnes and Noble or you can ask your local bookstore to order it. I can also send it to you directly, please see the contact page.
Thank you so much for this wonderful collection of poems. I deeply appreciated too your sense of mental illness, and "Lost" is a tremendously moving poem....
Your poetry about hearing loss soars. The finely calibrated images, the ways in which surprising new ways of being and thinking and feeling, the spiritual dimension of those poems, all truly beautiful. "A pathway into life."
Yes, the whole world of "disability" opens up new and meaningful dimensions of our humanity, as you show us in "Pieta."
Thank you for this work, this insight, this poetry.
Fred Marchant, Founding Director, The Poetry Center
Suffolk University, Boston, MA
Author of Said Not Said, from Graywolf Press
Your poetry about hearing loss soars. The finely calibrated images, the ways in which surprising new ways of being and thinking and feeling, the spiritual dimension of those poems, all truly beautiful. "A pathway into life."
Yes, the whole world of "disability" opens up new and meaningful dimensions of our humanity, as you show us in "Pieta."
Thank you for this work, this insight, this poetry.
Fred Marchant, Founding Director, The Poetry Center
Suffolk University, Boston, MA
Author of Said Not Said, from Graywolf Press
Prepare yourself to be drawn into Ann Conway’s cinematic portrayal of literal and inner spheres—where “everything far becomes near,” where vulnerability meets unflinching witness to histories and to hope. Lines like, “Oh Daddy,/Let us live again in all the lies you told about a better world,” offer a rich mixture of longing, divinity, ghosts and paradox. Conway brings local places and particular people to the page and layers her testimony with the ineffable muffle of deafness, creating a personal soundtrack to the human condition, muted and vibrant with “heartsounds.”
Jennifer Wallace, author of Almost Entirely.
Jennifer Wallace, author of Almost Entirely.