Ann Conway, a writer currently living in Pittsburgh, has been my dear friend for more than 15 years. We first met in a writing workshop in Santa Fe, both of us trying to navigate a working life and a writing life. She has recently released a chapbook of poetry, Everything Far Becomes Near (Finch & Fellow). Here is one poem, among many between the book’s covers, that stunned me into silence, quickening my spirit.

Hearing Test

Once I dreaded you,
all I could not hear,
the long pauses indicating failure.
But inside the grey padded booth,
I am amphibious,
My chambered heart thudding
as I listen to a symphony of sonar:
small beeps
far away trumpets and bumps
some imagined, most not.
I listen as hard to what I hear
as I did when a child at Scarborough Beach,
lying with ear to sand
that I knew was full of sea water,
all I loved and dreaded most.
In a world muted between beach and breeze,
I heard a whale call miles beyond the undertow.
I sensed his questing eye,
his barnacled heft
a citizen of the maplessness
where I have always longed to live,
in the country without test
that of Ysma’el, meaning
”God harkens, listens.”