“I’ve always written poems, so why wouldn’t I now?”
Martha Silano
Last year, when poet Martha Silano was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (A.L.S.), she turned to writing to make sense of her experience, the way that she’s always turned towards her art.
Silano first felt A.L.S. symptoms in early 2023. She’d gone paddleboarding in Lake Washington and experienced an intense muscle spasm in her abdomen after lifting her 30-pound board out of the water. She’d also found swallowing difficult. Intuitively, she googled A.L.S. and saw that her symptoms were consistent with the disease. But it wasn’t until the end of 2023 that she had a definitive diagnosis. Silano has bulbar-onset A.L.S., which comes with a life expectancy of two to three years.
After she was diagnosed, Silano, ’93, wrote exclusively about A.L.S. and her awareness of the disease’s progression. “I don’t spare the painful mental and physical details in my depiction of the road trip from weird sensations in my abdomen and the increasing inability to eat solid foods, to learning how to meditate daily while lying down, to having my daughter be my personal assistant during her summer break from college,” Silano says. Her forthcoming book of poems “Terminal Surreal” explores the difficulties of being alive and knowing there’s no cure for her ailment. It will be her sixth book. Her previous collections include titles like “This One We Call Ours,” winner of the 2023 Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry; and “The Little Office of Immaculate Conception,” winner of the 2010 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize and a Washington State Book Award finalist.
“The joke was that I wrote at red lights, and Lang wrote at the kitchen table while all order of the rumpus of raising children was going on around him.”
Martha Silano
From the moment she encountered Emily Dickinson’s poetry in the second grade, Silano knew she had found her art. In her 20s, her interests in lyric language led her to a writing course at Portland State University with poet Primus St. John. Later, she studied with Henry Carlile, ’67, a student of Theodore Roethke and Elizabeth Bishop, who inspired her to apply to the UW.
At the UW, Silano worked with poets Linda Bierds, ’71, and Richard Kenney and took an independent study with Heather McHugh. But David Wagoner had the biggest influence on how she wrote. “He quoted Stanley Kunitz, who said ‘a poet must know everything,’” Silano says. “I took this instruction very seriously and tried my best to learn the names of all the birds, flowers, trees and mushrooms the Pacific Northwest.” Wagoner’s love of nature inspired her. “I already loved everything to do with being out there with the bugs, plants and birds, but he made me want to write poems about what I saw, heard and felt.”
Equipped with an MFA from the UW, Silano taught composition and creative writing at Bellevue College and other schools in the Seattle area for thirty years. She taught classes while also raising two children with her husband, writer Langdon Cook, ’94. “It was never competitive,” says Silano. “The joke was that I wrote at red lights, and Lang wrote at the kitchen table while all order of the rumpus of raising children was going on around him. I was always impressed by his ability to write amid chaos. I did sometimes write at red lights, but I also wrote with one hand while pushing one of my kids on a swing at the playground, while they watched the siamangs at the Woodland Park Zoo, and before I went to bed, I scribbled down poems barely legible that I later picked up and revised.”
Along with extreme fatigue, Silano feels the nerves in her head vibrate. She uses daily guided meditations to manage the discomfort. Though she can no longer to spend long blocks of time on an iPhone or laptop, she is able to occasionally revise unfinished work and submit poems to magazines. She writes gratitude lists longhand in her journal and spends her time with family and friends being outside where she can gaze “at trees, Lake Washington and the howling coyotes, soaring bald eagles, twittering juncos and squawking coots of Seward Park.”
On a Bench Facing West
by Martha Silano
at 4:05 p.m. The wind is up.
A raft of common mergansers.
A bunch of herons on the floating dock.
Some crows there too.
It’s hard not to think
of all the times I jogged past this.
Ten-minute mile.
It’s hard to not make up a story
that everyone I pass on this trail is healthy.
Today my day spent figuring out how to climb stairs
less, how to conserve my energy for things like this
half-mile/half-hour walk. Forcing myself to slow
to a 29.37-minute-mile pace.
A woman said she counted thirteen herons.
The luck of it!!
And now the gratitude list:
Only one foot cramp.
My son did his laundry without me having to ask.
My daughter, insisting I read The Waves,
sent me images of underlined words
about being a stalk: My roots go down
to the depths of the world.
A pair of mallards. A pair of . . .
what are they called? They have chevrons
on their breasts. Oh yeah: gadwalls!
Wind blowing harder. Something about being
all fiber. I envy the joggers. The joggers,
and those who die in their sleep.
What’s Terrible
by Martha Silano
~ after Dorianne Laux
When the alpenglow fades and the ridicule flares. When the morass appears, three-quarters pestilence, one-quarter shale. A whining moth that morphs to a motif. A manager defending a pervert. A mandate to spray Roundup. A flea soiree. Flawed soil. When the moor is too briquette to sleep. When the stripes are too broad to see the rorqual for the Cyamus. A broken fin. Downturn far enough to throb. Jettison when it loses its riffle. Nonsense you can’t plait. A ridiculing jester, harder to listen to than traitors, than sitars at a Lunatic Éclair Siege. When the ATM eats your cardigan, your caress. You forgot to charge your phone. The plantains didn’t align. You need chemo, but CVS is flush out of toxins. Wastelands. Horsewhips. No map, no toilet paper, no headlamp. The sound of windbags through pineapple groves. The scent of Vieux-Boulogne. The menacing shadows of hemlocks.
Abecedarian with A.L.S.
by Martha Silano
A little bit sane (a little bit not).
Blackbirds that turned out to be boat-tailed grackles.
Crows that cannot covert their fury of feathers.
Don’t say Relyvrio reminds you of hemlock.
Every wave reassuringly governed by the moon, but what about riptides?
F*ck a duck!
Glad there’s a joyful edge, though narrower than a willet’s beak.
Hail in the forecast. A bitter taste:
it enables animals to avoid exposure to toxins.
Jaw stiffens, then relaxes. What will my body do next?
Kindness, we decide, is what we want to broadcast,
letting someone pull out in front of you in traffic,
make their turn, because the universe isn’t elegant,
no one’s really going anywhere important,
or running late to spin or vinyasa or
pilates. The neutral neutrons of the nucleus.
Quarks that are up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom, though
rehab in the CD, a lunch date in Leschi, PT in Madrona—it happens.
Socrates died of centripetal paralysis, a prominent loss of sensation.
Terminal: I wish it was more like waiting out a storm with an $18.00 glass of pinot.
Unbound bound.
Very much looking forward to overcooked orzo and finely chopped squash.
What was that you assured me—when we die, we wake from a dream?
X marks the rear of the theatre—one shove of poison—into a pure realm.
You know we’re all getting off at the same exit, right?
Zooey’s wish: to pray without ceasing.
Poems appear courtesy of Martha Silano. Acre Books will release “Terminal Surreal” in September 2025.