The Old Me
Jeanine Walker | Poetry
In its plastic case I held a Sanskrit
Buddhist manuscript a thousand
years old. “That’s eight million
dollars,” my friend said as the elevator
door banged open. “Be careful.”
So gentle, those words, such trust as I
carried it down the dark hall—only
the professor who lives with his hot plate
in office 408 has used this building
the past eighteen months—
and I think of the accumulation
of dollar books and thrift store jeans
in my half-abandoned home
in Seattle. In a thousand years
I’d never let a new friend carry
an eight-million-dollar document.
Or anyway, the old me wouldn’t have.
Here, though, I am unattached from things,
from money, know that when I leave
I’ll leave behind more than I brought:
through beveled windows, a peace
pulsing in the morning light,
me sitting up each day,
pen in hand, ready to write.
Jeanine Walker is the author of The Two of Them Might Outlast Me (Groundhog Poetry Press, 2022). She has received writing fellowships from Artist Trust, The Jack Straw Cultural Center, Wonju, UNESCO City of Literature, and Inprint. Her poems, essays, and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Bennington Review, Denver Quarterly, HAD, New Ohio Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. A poet with a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston, Jeanine is a long-time poetry teacher in Seattle and has recently taught English at Kangwon National University in Chuncheon, South Korea.