Recorded by countless performers since the early 1950s, “Sinner Man ” is an African American spiritual song describing a sinner running away from his awaited fate on Judgment Day. Arguably, the most famous recording is Nina Simone’s ten-minute epic, and given its prevalence in movies, TV shows, and samples by other musicians, titling a poetry collection Sinnerman is a bold take on a classic cultural soundtrack. But for Michael Waters, being bold has defined his poetic endeavors since the publication of his first book, Fish Light, in 1975. Like Simone before him, Waters’s Sinnerman (Etruscan Press 2023) takes the familiar and explores past and current events in ways that are both narratively provocative and lyrically reflective. Unlike the sinner man in the song, however, Waters’ speaker never turns his back to the uncomfortable, the unfortunate, and the uncertainty that often leaves too many wondering where they should turn to when their day of judgment finally arrives.
Divided into four sections, Sinnerman tackles fatherhood, marriage, aging, art, music, and the economic disparities burdened by geography, seamlessly moving between themes within poems themselves. Regardless of whether the setting is in Brooklyn, a poetry workshop, or the quaint confines of a bedroom, Waters’ speaker knows that the end of something has been reached, that loss is inevitable, and that the only best way to proceed in life is by taking a microscope to the past. Details of familial relationships are ripe throughout the collection, and in “My Father’s Comb,” a mother’s insistence on her son to take something that belonged to the speaker’s late father becomes a meditation on the ability of possessions to carry on a greater meaning after death:
But for years now I’ve run his comb,
As he did, under the cold-water tap,
Then dragged across my scalp
Only the shorter tines
Of the guillotine-shaped
Tool of vanity & work ethic.
Please take something, she’d said,
My father three days dead, but
I’d already nabbed the one object
I knew I’d touch each day
In such casual ritual
To comb the grief away.
While the speaker’s father’s possessions aren’t detailed in the first half of the poem, we can assume he had what any normal father had. But it’s the brush that the speaker nabs, and the only thing it appears he cares about, knowing not only its practical benefits (it seemed to have been a reliable comb for his father), but the fact that it’s now an extension of his father, that after death it’s a reminder of his routines, his personality, of who he was as a person in this world. The subject matter of the poem isn’t a new one (father-son relationship, death), but the way it’s rendered here so tenderly illuminates why poetry plays such a crucial role in detailing even the most insignificant experiences and things.
We see this vulnerability fleshed out even further in “Morning Song.” Upon driving his daughter to the DMV, the speaker realizes how both his words and silence have had the opposite effect of what he had hoped for:
All my life I have given bad advice
To those who matter most.
Marry me, I told my girlfriend.
Move closer, I urged my mother.
Write about what you know, I prodded my students.
It won’t kill you, I advised my late lover.
And what I didn’t tell anyone was worse—
The silence offered to my father,
The praise withheld from friends.
The speaker’s advice to his daughter to “Be the car” yielded nothing more than six knocked-over cones and frustration, and although such an interaction could be chalked up to a misunderstanding between father and daughter, Waters doesn’t stop short at a simple back-and-forth. He dives further into what he’s said in the past, how his words failed to manifest into the reality he wanted. At some point in our lives, we’ve all felt that our advice hasn’t lived up to the expectations we intended from it, and Waters brings this motivational inadequacy to light, even highlighting how his silence had the same underwhelming effect. We might find that there are certain disappointments that fill our past, but with Waters, we are at least honest with ourselves, we at least know we can face any shortcomings head on despite how much time has passed.
We also feel empowered to relive all things uncomfortable, like the speaker does in “My Son’s Penis,” detailing not only the embarrassment he feels walking into his son’s room and seeing him naked, but acknowledging to that he himself has aged, become something beyond what his words can convey:
I open the door too soon to find him
Slipping off his briefs. Words
I’d meant to convey slip away.
I respect his privacy, so
Can’t recall when I’d last seen
A penis not my own.
What surprises more than its size
Is its beauty—a tropical
Isle’s unsheathed stalk, mint
Roused from winter hibernation.
My son whose voice has yet to deepen,
His goofy laughter helium-pitched,
Regards me without self-consciousness.
In his son’s body, the speaker sees not only the contrast between generations, but a reflection of what he has lost, that carefree attitude that instills a certain confidence to live life to the fullest. Now, he doesn’t even look at his body in the same way anymore, resigned to letting it just be. But again, what better way to confront the reality of aging and death than being honest with what’s no longer true. This greater sense of self-awareness through others is evident also in “Old Dog,” which is a tragic reflection of the physical deterioration that plagues our bodies at the end of our lives:
Dog years/human years: our bodies age
By any measure of loss. Listen:
Old whore, old queen, your dry teats
Sag & sway & sweep the pollen
Off the floor. I recognize
My shrunken self within your rheumy eyes
& rage before the quivering tip of tail
Grown hairless, mottled, & obscene.
The speaker’s body, like his dog’s, has no choice but to become obscene. He has lost his hair, his eyesight, the strength and beauty he once claimed. The truth is often uncomfortable, but if confronted with an openness to understand what it means, then ideally there’d be nothing to fear.
While there is no doubt tragedy, heartbreak, and pain at every corner throughout the collection, there isn’t a plea for sympathy. Waters’ speaker doesn’t want it. Rather, he is looking for a way in which to retain his dignity in the face of the end that awaits. Taking a cue from Dylan Thomas, the speaker’s struggle in “That Good Night” to use the bathroom in a wheelchair becomes an opportunity to examine desire and self-worth:
Look away, please, & leave me
With a remnant of dignity
Before turning to wipe & flush,
Then gather each crumpled,
Papery part of me, this
Diminishing body, to push
Back to its narrow, semi-final bed.
I’ll drift between this world
And the next where
Martin Clara George Mae
Raymond Dorothy & all the dead
Of our not-quite-forgotten family
Claim this marrow as their own &
Together stoop to cradle me.
We can only hope that at the end of our lives, we are comforted in ways that don’t belittle or trivialize our health, that honor who we were as individuals, and that let us know that there is a possibility of peace when our bodies are ready to rest. Not everyone will get that privilege of reuniting, either physically or spiritually, with their family or loved ones, or will even be aware that the last chapter of their lives is about to come to a close, but Sinnerman’s tender language and emotional honesty provide a glimmer of hope in a world where regret and uncertainty are rampant. In Waters’ poems, the hard truths become harder to ignore, but with a willingness to face and accept them, we find a wealth of comfort on our way to a better place.
Esteban Rodríguez is the author of eight poetry collections, most recently Lotería (Texas Review Press, 2023), and the essay collection Before the Earth Devours Us (Split/Lip Press, 2021). His work has appeared in New England Review, Seneca Review, Colorado Review, Adroit Journal, Poetry Daily, and American Life in Poetry. He is the interviews editor at the EcoTheo Review, senior book reviews editor at Tupelo Quarterly, and associate poetry editor at AGNI. With Jennifer De Leon and Ben Black, he coedited To Never Have Risked Our Lives: An AGNI Portfolio of Central American and Mexican Diaspora Writing. He lives with his family in south Texas.