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[with 3 poems by Cheryl Wilder]
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Anything That Happens
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Until I was twenty, I believed anything
wouldn’t happen to me.
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Walking from the car,
leaving you behind,
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sirens whining louder as they closed on us;
I didn’t understand anything
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had just happened.
People said it wasn’t my fault
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and for reassurance,
It could have been me. But
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I heard what they didn’t say.
I’m so glad it wasn’t.
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Cheryl Wilder
from Anything That Happens, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2021.
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It’s 1990 and my kids are cruising toward teenagerdom. Every week in the throw-away medical journals that cross my desk there’s at least one article with a title like We Never Even Suspected, or Why Me? The doctor or doctor’s spouse laments about their teen who is (pick one): flunking out of college; a closet alcoholic; pregnant out of wedlock; addicted to Percocet. That becomes the one article I am compelled to read before assigning the journal to the round file. It’s a solid principal of statistics: if it happened to them it’s that much less likely to happen to me.
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Because today in 1990 my kids are, well, not perfect but above average. They are so good. And I am so good. Whatever that other doctor did to cause his child to go wrong, I would never do that. Because somehow at this interchange along the cosmic highway I am totally in charge of (and totally to blame for) all the choices my kids are making and will make.
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And responsible, of course, for all the rest, now and forever after. Are my parents happy? Is my wife fulfilled? Are my grandkids smart? Is there crabgrass in the flower bed? (Well, maybe I am responsible for that one.) Don’t worry, I am not poised here to write an article titled Everything That Would Have Been Better if I Were Better. That’s between me and 4 AM.
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Instead, I’m attempting a more compelling practice. A practice without textbooks or certification exams. One that requires nothing but offers everything. A practice never free from pain but sometimes tinged with joy. All that this practice endeavors is to prod a slight change in phraseology, poke a minor shift in frame of reference. When I learn of your misfortune, when you tell me about your pain, when I recognize that you are suffering, I will try my best not to say to myself I’m glad that isn’t me, and instead I will say, That is me.
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Xing
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I don’t know how I brought a child
into the world when I can’t reconcile
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if crashing a car and a friend’s skull
is karmic debt created
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or payment for a past immoral act.
I open doors and say thank you and do not try
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to behave in a way I cannot afford.
There’s no barometer, no way to know
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if the pendulum is swinging
away or toward, how many pay-it-forwards it takes
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before I break even at the gambling table.
I cold blend in with the pure
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if it weren’t for the scars that don’t fade
no matter how many turtles I save,
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so am I all that surprised
when my little boy tells me
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of his palpable fear
to cross the street.
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Cheryl Wilder
from Anything That Happens, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2021.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Sostenuto – a musical notation indicating a passage sustained to the utmost. Unrelenting. Imagine a violin’s piercing note, almost impossibly high and rising, horsehair glissando across the E-string. Now it’s joined in harmony by the A-string, discordant, the two dancing and warring with each other. They weave pitch and volume but never rest, sostenuto. You lean forward on the edge of your hard seat, your teeth are on edge, you want, you need, you crave desperately some resolution.
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Cheryl Wilder sustains tension throughout sixty-four pages to the ultimate climax of Anything That Happens. Her story is too piercing: one tastes blood and tears. She lives every moment with that high, sharp note, days and years of guilt and pain – she has irretrievably damaged her friend – and then also weaves discordant disharmonies from her cold relationship with her mother and her non-relationship with her father. More than once I had to lay the book aside and breathe deeply to slow my pounding heart.
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And more than once I resisted the urge to flip pages to the end. Who doesn’t crave resolution? What follows in this post today is the book’s penultimate poem. Some hurt can never be removed. No one can return to the moment before anything happens. Scars are just that, permanent marks and reminders of pain. How do any of us go on living? How? I invite you to enter the music of this book, its atonality and discord, one poem after another, until you reach its final page.
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Anything That Happens by Cheryl Wilder is a Tom Lombardo Poetry Selection and is available at Press 53. Among other awards, the book was a finalist for the 2022 Brockman-Campbell Award of the North Carolina Poetry Society; read an additional poem from the collection and celebrate 90 years of NCPS HERE.
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Home Safe
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Friends visit the hospital
where I am not wanted. It’s just as well
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that I stay in bed, carve poplar
into a shield I can place between
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myself and others, learn you wake
from a coma by the drop
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of my manslaughter charge. Years pass
before I hear your voice again,
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asking me to lunch over the phone, your mother
telling me I am only allowed in her home
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because you found my number
on your own. You reach for my arm
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to steady your walk, lean close
to see me in focus, your smile wide
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on one side of your face, brightened even more
at the restaurant when you flirt with the waiter.
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That is enough, to see a glimpse of the friend
I once knew, but then you reach cross the table
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for my hands, look at me to say
what you defied your mother to say,
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It’s not your fault. Over and again,
I forgive you. You can’t remember
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the night I cannot forget, but you know
your words are my salvation.
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There is no talk of next time.
You get out of the car and walk
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into the house, back to your mother
who can breathe once again.
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Cheryl Wilder
from Anything That Happens, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2021.
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V E R S E and I M A G E 
You are planting wonderful seeds. ---B