Muscle Memories of Love and Disaster
By Tim Mayo
Bainbridge Island Press
2026, 116 pages,
$19.99
The prologue poem of Tim Mayo’s haunting new poetry collection Muscle Memories of Love and Disaster, titled “Landscape with Still Life” centers on the image of a great blue heron, first disappearing into reeds at the edge of marsh and then later emerging, not in a dramatic embodiment of resurrection from death into life that the poet is hoping to witness, but rather
…the circumspect blue heron
reappearing in leggy defiance…
the slow, erratic dip
and ess of its neck posing
the same question again and again.
The same gesture of question recurs in thoughtful, hard-won meditations throughout the pages of this book: how does one carry on a fragile existence in the wake of fraught life events imbued with both love and disaster?
These poems are imbued with grief and loss. Mayo dedicates the book to four people: three dead, one living. The deceased are his treasured mentor, the poet Patricia Fargnoli, his daughter (not named here), and his former lover Amelia Hancock. The fourth person is his current partner, who he calls “Betsy, my muse.” In a number of the poems that deal with the deaths of his three beloveds, Mayo, who is not a believer, probes and tugs at the metaphysical possibilities circling the margins of their passages from this life. In “At the Chemo Clinic,” his chronicle of the one time he accompanied his daughter for treatment of a brain tumor, he describes the nurse coming to “attach the clear plastic hose to her chest and start the pump, / so I could see how prayer poured into the hourglass of her heart.” In “Meditation on Your Final Moment: For Pat Fargnoli” he wrestles with the mechanics of what actually occurred in that moment of her death, pushing away the conventional construct of some caressing wing of the holy spirit transporting her to a better place, while at the same time not being convinced that the biomechanical processes of her body simply ground to a halt. He concludes:
But I know
you’re waiting for some ecstatic flash of mind to happen
before the big sigh you only have to exhale once
lifts you to the wherever you’ve always wanted to be
Who cares whether it’s real or not?
Won’t that breath be worth it?
His acute perceptions in these transitional moments deepen the question of how do we carry our precious connections through experience of loss, without trying to arrive at a pat answer.
Mayo had his own recent brush with death, a near-fatal bicycle crash which put him into a coma with a tube down his throat and multiple debilitating fractures, leading to an arduous process of recovery, which he writes about in the book’s second section. In “Self-Portrait with Trache” (hospital shorthand for his breathing tube) he writes, “Grief is a black parrot in my throat.” In “A Different Color of Sun” he explains:
Friend,
I’ve come to the conclusion that suffering is the invisible
air we can’t stop breathing; it surrounds the spirit
like the unconscious laying siege to our joy.
He describes the aftermath of this disastrous accident with a remarkable balance of dispassion and clarity, not self-pitying, but seeking to set down a record of a terrible human experience, and how it feels to endure. Then, in a remarkable piece “The Why Answers,” he pivots from suffering towards love and survival:
Because the black hole that sucks me into
the misery of my past, where I love to wallow
has suddenly lost its gravity, and I laugh with joy
and
Because the poem has become my prayer
and poetry my only cult
and
Because suddenly I want to love in a way
I never knew, no ifs and buts about it,
Compassion is the tail that wags my dog
The bobbing questions he has been asking all along suddenly find a declamatory voice, a poem that is capable of answers.
Mayo also explores his early past, which had its own bleak overtones. He hardly knew his birth parents and was raised mostly in foster homes. His childhood memories well up in partially recalled vignettes— a row of stately elm trees suddenly cut down, an exploding pressure cooker leaving a dent and splatter on the kitchen ceiling— concrete embodiments of small disasters held from a young age. In “The Steel Gray Nail” he meditates on a grayscale photo he has kept of one hardscrabble foster couple that made a more lasting impression on him than others, recalling the day, at age five, when he was inexplicably separated from them. In a rage, he stomped on a construction waste pile by their house, and punctured his foot with a nail:
…and the shingler,
who pulled the steel gray nail from my foot,
then carefully placed it in the small box
of my heart as if to say, Remember this.
as if the only memorable things from such a childhood are pain and catastrophe. But Mayo keeps looking further. He includes a couple of poems about gazing at his image in a mirror to determine just who he is and how he managed to get through to the current stage in his life. In “Reflection” he concludes
…its beveled glass
seeming as if you were gazing into a jewel
seeing at last the preciousness of yourself.
The penultimate piece in the collection, “Butterfly,” is a love poem for his current partner Betsy, a metaphor for the beauty and fragility of a loving relationship. He notes how poets, as collectors of metaphors, much as butterfly enthusiasts collect specimens, seek to preserve these delicate things, using pen and verse in place of pins and display cases, and in doing so, validate and complete the complex swaths of human experience that can only be appreciated metaphorically. Muscle Memories of Love and Disaster is such a display, showcasing a narrative arc that in less perceptive hands might have been relentlessly dreary, but through Mayo’s honest, clear-eyed lines becomes a heart-felt testimony to resilience and humanity.
Robbie Gamble’s essays have appeared in Scoundrel Time, Pangyrus, Pithead Chapel, Under the Gum Tree and Tahoma Literary Review. He was a 2019 Peter Taylor Fellow at the Kenyon Summer Writers Workshop. He worked many years as a nurse practitioner caring for homeless people in Boston, and now divides his time between Massachusetts and Vermont.
