A book in the hand

My book arrived! A box of them from FedEx on the front doorstep when I got home from work. It's hard to describe what it's like, opening a box and taking out your own book, the slight heft of it in your hand, the shiny cover, the pristine pages with all those strangely familiar poems. Years of scribbling in notebooks, and then this...

I just got back from doing my first readings in Taos, New Mexico. Read at the SOMOS in town, and at my cousin Seamus's art studio, where we did a joint Painting/Poetry event on Saturday to celebrate What Just Happened and Seamus being back in Taos to stay. Taos is a rich community of artists, writers, and musicians. Everyone I met was welcoming and inclusive. "Come and live here!" they exclaimed when I told them how much I loved the place, its pace, adobe tones, and spectacular surrounding landscape of mountain, sage desert, and the Rio Grande gorge. 

Every book has a poem I like to read last at a reading. A 'chewy' one with an air of finality. In this book, it's Coyotes.

Coyotes

                                “Gravity cannot account for falling in love.”

-          Albert Einstein

2a.m. and the coyotes start

with their howls of victory and despair.

I’m seeing it everywhere: the keys in their jar,

the bird that flew up unhurt this morning

from beneath the car, an insect’s gauzy wings

against the lamp – we live as though these things

and how the day went

constitute the only way things are.

When I make these journeys

back to the country of my birth

it feels like flying into the old

territory of my roadless self, my history;

days before I board the plane

I start to shed the layers of it all

like parchment wrappings, then I step

into empty time in the departures hall.

They board the infants, then first class,

then the rest of us. Rush of takeoff,

the brilliant sky and the clouds;

because of the uncertainty principle

space is never empty; because of supergravity

and supersymmetry we have unified theories

of everything, including the seven unplanned

curled up other dimensions I can’t fully understand.

But I have formed my own slender theory

of quantum uncertainty, cradled up here

in the stratosphere by the laws of nature

and the four forces: if all of existence

is just patterns of vibrations without width or height,

end or start, then what connects us

must be the wildness that runs riot

in the clamorous chambers of the heart.

In the big past, it’s understood

that stars burned through their hydrogen till they collapsed,

beryllium fused with helium before it could decay

to form a stable carbon isotope

which is how I’m sitting here today,

unruly conduit from heart to page

for all the sudden joy, the human hurt

and sorrow, laughter, love, and rage

that makes us undertake

these solo expeditions into the territory.

There isn’t any map.

You have to be the architect of your life,

the poet of it, hunger for what the future holds,

face the inevitable, the unknown, and like the coyotes,

pound down the double doors of the night and come out

fires blazing, eyes wide open, heart alight.