Adult Life Jackets: A Collaborative Work of Visual Art and Poetry by Scott Sandell and Christopher Watkins, Deepwater Editions (tentative release date of November 2008)

Excerpts from the book are forthcoming in The Southampton Review.

Included in the work is the poem: As If She Has Two Marbles in Her Ears

As If She Has Two Marbles In Her Ears

As if she has two marbles in her ears—
taupe and ochre swirls laced with
cream, ocean greens, light
sienna; deftly polished
glints of sterling silver—sounds of
clapping reach her mind, prism-
angled, from a small but yearning
distance, like a wind gust moving
through a bleached-out skull.

                        When she
prays, she lays her hands out like a
net over the sea.

Above her, in the ceiling, neon
lights become her newfound conste-
llations; the mythologies of
hospitals enacted in a
cold electric drama—sounds of
elevators, oxygen, the
pumps, the graying clocks.

                        When she
prays, her net of hands becomes a
quivering Cat’s Cradle.

Through the conches of her ears
she invites in all the
cadence of the ocean. Lying
drying in the bolted sterling
silver of her cot—withered
starfish on a pillow—she is
wondering if someone young is
going to pull her legs off.