'Dining on Salt' bares grief and beyond, seven lines at time

Wayne Lee of Santa Fe says there are three ways readers can think of his new book, “Dining on Salt: Four Seasons of Septets.”

One way is simply as a poetry collection. There are eighty poems in all.

A second way is to consider the poems as a memoir in verse.

A third way is as an instructional tool. As Lee put it in a phone interview, “It’s the most exhaustive study of the seven-line (poetic) form.”

All of the poems in the collection are in seven lines, and about one-fourth of them are variations on the form known as a septet. Most are in free verse.

Lee had spent a full, disciplined year composing only seven-line poems, none shorter, none longer.

However, he was only three months into that seven-line poetry project when his wife, Alice, died by suicide in 2018.

In the book’s preface, Lee writes, he spent the next nine months “trying to cope with the shock of that loss, stumbling through my grieving process and doing my best to re-create my life as a widower.”

And reclaim his work as a poet.

“Capturing the upheaval of that year in seven-line capsules was a daunting challenge … The limitation of the seven-line form forced me to crystallize my thoughts and feelings and helped me digest them in bite-sized bits, rather than choking on the enormity of it all,” Lee further writes in the preface.

Now, seven years later, after burnishing the poems — some he reworked more than 100 times — and intensely researching the seven-line form, the collection is out.

He uses the word septet both as the specific rhyme scheme and also as a synonym for “any and all” seven-line poems.

Here then are three examples of poems in the book that possess the poignant quality of a memoir.

“Accident: A Septolet”

“Yesterday/I accidentally/threw out/your old love/letters.

“You, who died on me.”

A septolet is a spartan seven-line form that, Lee writes, “contains 14 words with a break in between the two parts and that both parts contain the same idea.”

Septolet is listed in the book’s second appendix, “A Compendium of Seven-Line Forms.”

The first appendix is “A Brief History of the Septet,” in which Lee notes that 14th century poet Geoffrey Chaucer was the pioneer of the septet in English.

“Reading to My Wife”

“Will you read to me? she asks/when she can’t sleep. Will you read/from Peter Rabbit or Winnie the Pooh?/

“So I sit by her bed rail and narrate again/the tales she knows so well, until the meds/kick in, until she closes her eyes,/clutching her favorite bear.”

“The Bat”

“She yells at the walls of her small apartment,/the ceiling, window, door. She feels trapped/in her assisted living cell, she says, shut off/from the life she lived, the world she loved.

“Once a bat got in her room and flapped in frantic/circles, desperate to escape. Oh, to have that/sounding sense, to find one’s way free again.”

Lee felt his wife betrayed him for not telling him of her impending suicide plans. After all, he had been her caregiver for 20 years “and she counted on my being with her,” Lee said.

Soon after they had first met in a Seattle Starbucks in 1996, they fell in love. Lee said Alice informed him that she was suffering from a fatal, genetic disease and that she would die before her time. He had to decide if he wanted to stay with her. He did and they married.

“She was wonderfully vivacious, charming, an energetic student of life, yet she had this hanging over her,” Lee said. Actually, hanging over them.

In the days before her death, Lee said, Alice was on the Oregon coast with one of her daughters and her family. He was unable to reach her by phone. Then he left a message for her at her assisted living facility.

Lee said he got a call back from someone at the facility who told him Alice was in bed and was unresponsive. “Unresponsive? What does that mean?” he recalled thinking.

He drove to the facility and was told by another staffer, “Your wife has died.”

“They wouldn’t let me in. They said it was a crime scene,” he said.

When Lee was finally allowed in, Alice’s living area was a mess. “She was trying to find the goodbye letter to me from nine years earlier. I found it but it didn’t appease me,” he said. “I had counted on my being with her. I had to work through a lot of anger and grief.”

Alice Rose Lee, a poet and a painter, was 66 when she died.

Besides being a poet, the 75-year-old Wayne Lee has worked as a newspaper, magazine and book editor and leads poetry writing workshops.

“Dining on Salt” is part of the Portage Poetry Series of Cornerstone Press at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.

'Dining on Salt' bares grief and beyond, seven lines at time