What We Do by Michele Bombardier
Finalist for the Washington State Book Award in Poetry
Kelsay Books, 2018
Michele Bombardier’s debut poetry collection What We Do is a balm in this fractious moment. Even as the world seems to be splintering into factions, Bombardier’s poems celebrate moments of connection: between parents and children, between doctors and patients, between the living and the dead, between the speaker and her sometimes haunted past.
Poem after poem highlights not only emotional connection, but actual human touch. In “Hunger,” the speaker visits Father Michael in a care facility to work with him towards recovery from a presumed brain injury. His smile is “lopsided,” he wears his rosary strung across his ears and nose, and he sucks on the cross of his crucifix. His eyes are closed, but when he opens them, Bombardier writes, he “puts his hand to my forehead, / assuming I’ve come to ask for a blessing.” In “Baptism,” an intern visits a patient. As the poem opens, the patient pulls free his catheter and douses her with urine. And yet she “pull[s] up a chair, lower[s] the bedrails.” She sits with the agitated patient and then, Bombardier writes,
He found my hand, I tell you, he quieted,
like someone drowning finds a ring buoy,
holds tight, then swims, carried
by the current, back to shore.
With her own medical training, Bombardier would be familiar with touch hunger, would know that infants can die from prolonged lack of human contact, would be aware of how touch deprivation affects people in assisted living facilities, the elderly, the injured. Bombardier writes not only of the importance of emotional connection, but also about the healing properties of touch. Again and again the people in Bombardier’s poems risk—and offer—this moment of touch, this deepest human connection. In “A Taste of Sweetness,” Bombardier writes,
The time for words had passed
and my father, who did not speak
to me for years, blinked
as he reached for my hand
raising the spoon to his lips,
his hand I knew
from earliest memory as fist…
Through this brief moment of touch, love and forgiveness enter the troubled parent-child relationship and provide “the answer to my long wondering / what could happen / if fear left the house.” Through touch, compassion. Through compassion, forgiveness.
Bombardier keeps her dead close, understanding that they too crave contact—and that she herself craves contact with them. In “What I Want To Believe,” Bombardier writes, “I want to believe the hummingbird that helicoptered over my ear / was my mother-in law, back for a visit.” In “A Toast to My Ghosts” she toasts to the ghosts of an alcoholic father and a mother “put[ting] up posters to cover the holes / in the walls.” Everywhere, “the footsteps of those on the other side a constant / in the house.” The poems in What We Do “believe in holding / close to what I can’t see” and through that act of holding, find healing for what fractures us.
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Jennifer Saunders is the author of Self-Portrait with Housewife (Tebot Bach, 2019), winner of the 2017 Clockwise Chapbook Competition. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Glass, The Shallow Ends, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere. Jennifer holds an M.F.A. from Pacific University and lives in German-speaking Switzerland.