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, …

I learned how the mind works

watching a stroke

dismantle my Grandpa.

If he wanted to know what day it was,

he’d say “Chris, tell me what…

…then his face would constrict,

his eyes would cross,

the skin on his neck would redden,

…

Between our ninth

and tenth anniversaries,
we walk along the beach.

It’s September.
I can tell by the depth of your eyes

that you’re missing your grandmother.
She died in a fury of refusal,

a woman of faith,
fighting cancer’s victory harder

than she ever fought its challenge.
I can feel you hating death

for being certain.
Just this morning, you stood up from breakfast,

the soft flesh of your face flushed and puffing,
to take your welling tears to the bathroom.

I rose to stop you, wrap you up,
felt you mutter into my shirt

that you cannot handle “this death thing.”
We keep walking,

with the water to our left.
Across the waves, there are cities

neither you nor I have been to.
They seem wilder than the water’s breaking tide,

so far from the immediacy of small cuts in our …