• Home
  • Poetry Prompts
  • For Writers
  • Daily Poem-Subscribe! ✨
  • Teaching Tools
  • Free Stuff + BOOKS
  • Patron Love

Marjorie Maddox and “Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation”

By Glynn Young 2 Comments

Flowering Tree Maddox
A friend I first met in college lived nearby, and two years ago we finally got together when a third friend came from out of town. We hadn’t seen each other in more than 40 years, and it was as if college had just happened yesterday. We looked older and more life-marked, but the same personalities sat around a table, eating flatbread and drinking wine. Some months before, my in-town friend had had a heart transplant. He described what it was like not to have a pulse, something you don’t think about unless there isn’t one.

A year later, we had scheduled another lunch, with another out-of-town college friend. I opened the newspaper a few weeks before our lunch date and saw his obituary. He had had a stroke, a not uncommon complication, even well after the operation. The transplant had given him almost two more years.

Marjorie Maddox’s father had far less time than that after his heart transplant. The transplant went well; the unexpected blood infection was fatal. Maddox tells the story in a series of poems in Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation. She considers the donor, the operation, the family in the waiting room, the unexpected infection, and then afterward, after the transplant, after his death, when everything seems the same but nothing is the same, when the hope that was offered by a hole in a stranger’s body becomes dies with a father’s grave.

Disconnected

Transplant Transport Transubstantiation MaddoxIts nerves left dangling,
so many severed cords
uncoiled and floundering
about uninsulated space
I think—until a priest-turned-
surgeon explains in stops and shocks
the transubstantiation of transplants,
what others’ hearts were, are, continue to become
inside our opened hollows,
disconnected from used nerves
that bridge to blood.

Instead, this always-symbol,
always-physical of personage
completes itself, confidently connecting
to what it needs, its structural node
part of that separate
chambered system of someone else,
heart of the fact that keeps it still
believing what it does.

In the transplant waiting room,
a child asks her mother,
“Will Daddy love the same people?”
and I startle at the complications.

While the slow clock sterilizes
the lives of those waiting shock-still
or nervous-twitching.
I think, out-of-time, or persons whom I’ve become
On stage, transforming what I wasn’t into
What I wasn’t.

In seventh grade, the penalty for breaking
character in Theater class was failure.
And so we sat obediently as old women
but staring boldly, disconcertingly
back-and-forth at the blushing prop boy,
the unplugged cord, when,
in Arsenic and Old Lace,
the telephone kept ringing, ringing, ringing.

Majorie Maddox

Marjorie Maddox

Maddox writes, too, of marriage, heredity, love and anniversaries, neighborhoods, and teaching. She includes a rather extraordinary series of poems under the general title of “Body Parts,” in which each part of the body is given its say, or its description. And then she concludes with poems about sacraments and holy days, spiritual considerations, flying on an airplane to or from Oslo, Ireland, and Yugoslavia (as the area used to be called).

Maddox is the author of 10 previous poetry collections, including Nightrider to Edinburgh (1986), Body Parts (1999); Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (2004 and now being republished by Wipf and Stock Publishers); Weeknights at the Cathedral (2006); Local News from Someplace Else (2013); Perpendicular as I (1999 and 2013); and True, False, None of the Above (2018). She is the co-author of the anthology Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (2005) and author of two children’s books, including Rules of the Game: Baseball Poems (2009).

Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation is about change both sudden and gradual. It is about what binds us in relationships, and what happens when those binds come undone or are severed. And it’s about reliance, what we have and what we find to help us go on.

Related:

Poetic Voices: Teow Lim Gow and Marjorie Maddox

Photo by Harold Lloyd, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young, author of the novels Dancing Priest, A Light Shining, and the newly published Dancing King, and Poetry at Work.

Browse more book reviews

__________________________

How to Read a Poem by Tania Runyan How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.

“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”

—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

Buy How to Read a Poem Now!

  • Author
  • Recent Posts
Glynn Young
Follow Glynn
Glynn Young
Editor and Twitter-Party-Cool-Poem-Weaver at Tweetspeak Poetry
Glynn Young lives in St. Louis where he recently retired as the team leader for Online Strategy & Communications for a Fortune 500 company. Glynn writes poetry, short stories and fiction, and he loves to bike. He is the author of Poetry at Work and the Dancing Priest Series. Find Glynn at Faith, Fiction, Friends.
Glynn Young
Follow Glynn
Latest posts by Glynn Young (see all)
  • Poets and Poems: Troy Cady and “Featherdusting the Moon” - January 12, 2021
  • How J.R.R. Tolkien Met an Obligation – with Poetry - January 5, 2021
  • Forgotten Classics: “Understood Betsy” by Dorothy Canfield Fisher - December 15, 2020

Related

❤️✨ Sharing is caring

Filed Under: article, book reviews, Books, Heart Poems, Poems, poetry, poetry reviews, Poets

Comments

  1. L.L. Barkat says

    August 14, 2018 at 3:49 pm

    What a remarkable poem (and a bracing and tender sounding collection).

    I love the child’s question, on so many levels. “Will Daddy love the same people?”

    A psychologist friend of mine has shared about research that is strange indeed: sometimes a heart transplant *does* leave us loving other things (something to do with the way the brain actually extends neurologically into the heart has given those with transplants new musical tastes and even, at times, new memories. Even unsolved murders have been solved when patients suddenly know things they didn’t know before. Strange, huh? 🙂

    Then there’s the way our own hearts are sort of within the person who is lost to us, and we may be wondering: “Will I love the same way, now that a piece of my heart is gone?”

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Marjorie Maddox Writes Poems about Reading and Writing Poems | says:
    April 7, 2020 at 5:01 am

    […] Marjorie Maddox and “Transplant, Transport, and Transubstatiation” […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Take How to Read a Poem

Get the Introduction, the Billy Collins poem, and Chapter 1

get the sample now

Welcome to Tweetspeak

New to Tweetspeak Poetry? Start here, in The Mischief Café. You're a regular? Check out our January Menu.

Keep the World Poetic

❤️

Welcome a little patron love, when you help keep the world thoughtful and poetic.

5 FREE POETRY PROMPTS

Get 5 FREE inbox poetry prompts from the popular book How to Write a Poem

Join the Poetry Club

Join the poetry club, when you become a subscriber to Every Day Poems ✨

The classic—Now a Graphic Novel!

"Stunning, heartbreaking, and relevant illustrations"

Callie Feyen, teacher

read a summary of The Yellow Wallpaper

Recent Comments

  • Megan Willome on By Heart: ‘Everything Is Going To Be All Right’ + New W.H. Auden Challenge
  • Dave Malone on Poetry Prompt: ‘Twelfth Night’ and the Fool
  • Amy F on By Heart: ‘Everything Is Going To Be All Right’ + New W.H. Auden Challenge
  • Amy F on 30 Days to Richer Writing—Part I Community Room

Featured In

We're happy to have been featured in...

The Huffington Post

The Paris Review

The New York Observer

Tumblr Book News

Join Tweetspeak Poetry

Categories

Explore Work From Black Poets

Learn to Write Form Poems

How to Write an Acrostic

How to Write a Ballad

How to Write a Catalog Poem

How to Write a Ghazal

How to Write a Haiku

How to Write an Ode

How to Write a Pantoum

How to Write a Rondeau

How to Write a Sestina

How to Write a Sonnet

How to Write a Villanelle

Free Printable Poet Bios

Browse all poet bios now

Shakespeare Resources

Poetry Classroom: Sonnet 18

Common Core Picture Poems: Sonnet 73

Sonnet 104 Annotated

Sonnet 116 Annotated

Character Analysis: Romeo and Juliet

Character Analysis: Was Hamlet Sane or Insane?

Why Does Hamlet Wait to Kill the King?

10 Fun Shakespeare Resources

About Shakespeare: Poet and Playwright

Top 10 Shakespeare Sonnets

See all 154 Shakespeare sonnets in our Shakespeare Library!

About Us

  • • Our Story
  • • Meet Our Team
  • • Literary Citizenship
  • • Poet Laura
  • • Poetry for Life: The 5 Vital Approaches
  • • T. S. Poetry Press – All Books
  • • Contact Us

Write With Us

  • • 5 FREE Poetry Prompts-Inbox Delivery
  • • 30 Days to Richer Writing Workshop
  • • How to Write Form Poems-Infographics
  • • Poetry Club Tea Date
  • • Poetry Prompts
  • • Submissions

Read With Us

  • • All Our Books
  • • A Ritual to Read to Each Other
  • • Best Love Poetry
  • • Book Club
  • • Children’s Book Club
  • • Every Day Poems
  • • Literacy Extras
  • • Literary Analysis
  • • Poems to Listen By: Audio Series
  • • Poets and Poems
  • • VerseWrights Journal
  • • William Blake Poems Arts & Experience Library
  • • William Shakespeare Sonnet Library

Celebrate With Us

  • • Poem on Your Pillow Day
  • • Poetic Earth Month
  • • Poet in a Cupcake Day
  • • Poetry at Work Day
  • • Random Acts of Poetry Day
  • • Take Your Poet to School Week
  • • Take Your Poet to Work Day

Gift Ideas

  • • Give the Gift of Every Day Poems
  • • Our Shop
  • • Everybody Loves a Book!

Connect

  • • Donate
  • • Blog Buttons
  • • By Heart
  • • Shop for Tweetspeak Fun Stuff

Copyright © 2021 Tweetspeak Poetry · Site by The Willingham Enterprise · FAQ & Disclosure