Have poems, will travel.

I'm about to move house. Of course, this means moving all my books. Some people when they move pack all their kitchen utensils lovingly in bubble wrap. Some people focus on boxing up all their framed art and wedding gift china/pottery/asian carvings. I turn first to the books. It always takes a lot more boxes than I plan for. I throw books out, I really do. I'm ruthless. I am Book Culling Queen.

But at the end of the day, I can't bear to be without a significant dictionary between hard covers. My Websters has always doubled as a great flower presser for my daughter. Nor can I forego David Shipman's "The Story of Cinema," Peter Ackroyd's biography of T.S. Eliot, or my plastic-film-covered copy of Godel Escher Bach that both you and I know I will never actually read unless I am one day bedridden for 6 months with a mysterious ailment that allows only for eye movement.

While packing my books, it came to my attention that I had a ridiculous number of slender poetry volumes. Many of these were amassed in the 1980s and 90s in Dublin when the rise of small presses allowed young, urban poets to get their voices heard by the poetry-loving Irish public. Recently I heard from an Irish woman now living in Canada who had bought my early books and told me how she read them with her husband and continued to enjoy them over the years.

It struck me how I have done the same with my favorite volumes: carried them with me on planes, to the beach, to dentist waiting rooms. My Dylan Thomas Collected Poems has completely fallen apart from use. My Complete Shakespeare was once run over by a bus. Duct tape came to the rescue. It's an odd thought that someone else might have one of my collections in their bag while they wait for the train or sit at the boarding gate. My books have emigrated with people, traveled to places I have never been, made ripples in the lives of strangers I will never know about. Right on, slender volumes!

Ok, back to packing. But first, a recent poem from my trip to Taos, New Mexico.

New Mexico Sixty Eight

On the road to Santa Fe from Taos

the sky went slowly wild with dawn pinks

and blues, I felt loose in my life, rattled.

Orange rain in the far South,

the Rio Grande riding by on its own time

with its own secret set of expectations.

Some nights before, we had driven out

beyond the last of the mobile homes

to the end of the road; the Milky Way

wrapped her cool scarf round the moon’s throat,

coyotes yipped and yowled

and the mesa dogs joined them.

I stood by the car, cold, a little jarred,

and I wished someone would hug me

but nobody did. I’m glad.

Every evening after that we headed

to the Guadalajara Bar and Grill

and in the parking lot among the flatbed trucks

we watched the sky unfold and unfold

and unfold, and it felt good

to know just why I was afraid;

that sometimes it takes driving out

to where there’s no more road,

to listen to the dark, and pick apart

the winking plane lights from the satellites,

hum a lullaby if humming is all you can come by

and let it burn away, the surface layer

the jewelry, till you are down to something

more raw, more elemental, to where fear

lies quietly side by side with sadness

anger, joy, whatever else you need in life

just to get by, to get you on that road to Santa Fe

and the airport and the plane and the home alone.

When I am not making vast sums of money as a poet, I work full time as a hospice nurse. Before that I nursed in neuro rehab, with folks who had sustained traumatic brain and spinal cord injuries, or had conditions like ALS and Huntington's.

Naturally, nursing has informed my poetry and now that I work with the dying, I have the perfect excuse to write about one of my favorite subjects. I wrote about death long before I was a hospice nurse, but now I feel I have a solid reason for my fascination with the topic.

Strangely, though, the nursing poems come slowly. This is partly due to the constraints of HIPAA, the health information privacy act that prohibits health workers from sharing the private health information of their patients. And partly because their stories just take a long time to settle with me in such a way that they directly influence my work. They influence my daily life profoundly, but seem to take a long time to bubble up in the poems. I've read books by nurses and doctors about real-life patients. I wonder how they change the material enough to satisfy HIPAA without losing the essence of the story.

This poem from What Just Happened fuses my curiosity about what happens when we die with my love of driving. It also explores how the spirits of the dead can be felt by the living. I have experienced this myself and through others too many times to dismiss it as fancy. Just the other day, the daughter of my dying patient told me she felt her dead brother visit the room several times while she sat at her mom's bedside. He was here, she told me, I felt him, and then he left. Later he was here again. I can't explain how I knew this, but I just knew. Her mom, well into her dying process and beyond any speech to her living children, had been speaking aloud to her dead son. A pragmatic woman, she had asked him What are you doing here?

Gone Driving

Fall now, no escaping.

First rain broke the spell,

the hot dry promise

broken by the downpour

and the next day’s damp loamy smell.

The storm was brewing for at least a day,

call it a change in barometric pressure

but I sensed the ghost of the guy in 4A

we lost in June. He was in his old room.

The other nurse felt him too.

Happier now, this man.

Kingdom come. Gone home

one way people euphemize for dead.

Crossed over, they will say, or passed on.

I think of it more as simply gone.

But perhaps we get to revisit lost loves,

favorite rooms, best afternoons

when we are gone.

A picnic lunch on Hampstead Heath

in 1991, a night out on Camden Town.

That 2 a.m. proposal over a Chianti bottle,

the stolen kiss with a boy I barely knew.

Paris,  the spread out jewelry of her light -

or maybe the spirit gets to do

whatever feels completely right.

Mine will be taking a grand tour

of the United States

in an ivory 1956 Coup de Ville.

No need for gas, rest stop, motel,

just driving, top down, music blowing back

all day and all night: San Francisco

to New York, south to Key West,

through New Orleans and along the gulf coast,

the livid dawns, the dusks,

through every shade of white

that the southwest desert glare burns

and the sky turns as I head

inevitably for the Pacific Rim,

the breakers, and the high plunge off the cliffs

to the wild ocean, calling me home to drown.

Poems.

Some people have been asking how they can read my poems online. "On my blog," I reply, secretly feeling enormous pressure to blog more, post poems, and generally do things recently published writers are supposed to do.
So here are some poems from my new book. The first one is about taking my 13-year-old daughter driving on beach roads in Point Reyes.

South Beach

I let her drive

on the narrow road down to the beach

between the dunes with their russet ice-plant hair;

she was thirteen, piloting the car with infinite care.

The sea was boiling mad

climbing the beach,

ice-green at the curled-over tops of the waves,

then darker green and churned-up sandy foam.

She stood at the edge

taking video with her phone,

blond hair blown across her sea-green eyes.

In an instant, the gods could decide to snatch her back

I could no more hold her

than the fine sand,

I could no more keep her safe

than the wind or salty air;

but we stood together there

at the ragged edge of the land

and the churn and rush of the waves merged in a rising choir,

a melody, not sweet, but urgent, uncontrolled;

it sang of me and her,

of the earth that arose, bold,

from the featureless ocean, the hill of the world,

and of all mothers and their wild unpredictable girls;

and the sun god, a phoenix,

alit on the hill where we stood

with her filming the waves, and me

holding on to her in my mind, in my imagination

so it felt like

I would always have her near.

And then we walked back up the sandy path to the car

and we got in, and smiled at each other, and I put her in gear. 

***

This next one comes out of my experiences as a neuro rehab nurse, working in a small hospital with patients who had suffered traumatic brain injuries, spinal cord injuries, and conditions like ALS and stroke.

Sailing

I’m in a place where much hurt comes to rest,

a confluence of pain and rapture,

laughter and despair.

Hunger is acknowledged here,

loss hangs in the air,

grief is recognized, renewed.

The broken come here, endure

blinding light, engulfing dark.

This is a house of ill luck

built upon hope, layer above layer;

in this house, let the heart

incline toward kindness.

The people who stay here

sleep the sleep of those

who go on losing and losing;

they come empty-handed, wounded,

flung out of the orbit of their lives,

wrung free of ego,

flushed of the insatiable self love.

I witness the ills that they endure

and when I mourn for them

all the old sorrows rise like water,

a cello joins the piano solo

in the house of their tomorrows.

Midday, I sit out on the hot bridge,

the frogs are in concert in the creek,

at ease; small miracles of heat

rise off the wood,

the planet runs on and on

with her disease

but I feel that something good

has been promised here,

something bigger than anybody

planned. After work I sit a while

in my car before I put it

into gear and drive out

beyond the daycare center

and community church, far

past the tidal pull of all my patients’

sorrow, tugging at the ropes

of the small vessel I will sail

back to them tomorrow.

***

And this is a new poem, as yet unpublished. If you are still reading, mazel tov!

Morning Number One

I’m alone in our room,

it’s raining, lovely dove grey,

the forecast is for accumulating sadness

over the latter part of the day.

Let me be done with the business of doing

and the work of love, let me go down

to the lake with a pen, some champagne,

climb to the loft above the straight yellow bales,

let me free myself from all incarceration;

the sky will keep giving and giving

in a rage of sunset,

the night will move up the mountain

towards a color no-one can name

left over by the last of the sun, and at the lake,

I’ll see a landscape that shouldn’t be there,

the low water mark from a famished year;

yellow moon will rise over wasteland,

illuminating nothing;

I will string lights around the dark

and I will say my few words into that same dark

because night is the only vessel  that can hold them,

small as they are, too big for the light,

coming out fully formed, quiet and right;

and after the moon lays its shadow

over the forest of firs and the coastal scrub,

along the sand where the mole crabs

tickle my feet beneath the broken surf

I will make my promise into the waves,

the ocean as witness, a promise

that will lead me to the dawn,

and this: morning number one,

which is where the boy soprano comes in,

grief of innocence,

single violin.

3...2...1...we have liftoff!

 If you have never been to Open Secret Bookstore in San Rafael, here's what greets you when you first walk in: 

Apart from serving the planet's best chai and housing an astonishing collection of books and spiritual items, Open Secret is a richly welcoming venue for events such as...poetry book launches! Imagine my delight to find myself launching my new collection there last Friday night in front of an audience of friends and friendly strangers. The room was not this full or tidy, but here's what it kind of looked like:

There were poems. There were slides to accompany them. There was wine, cheese, fruit, and weird coconutty snack things. I read for nearly an hour, phenomenally long for me. I sold many more books than usual. You could say the evening was a big success, but that would be an understatement for me. 

This was the culmination of about ten years of planning between me and my friend Connie Shaw. She owns and runs Sentient Publications, Boulder. Now she is my U.S. editor/publisher (I still publish in Ireland with The Gallery Press). We have fun with this. I call her Ed, she suggests outrageous places we could fly to for readings. We planned this book on beaches, on planes, in bars and ice-cream parlors and Russian tea houses. And now we have done it, launched it, celebrated it, and even started selling it. This is beyond fun!

Below is the first poem I read on Friday night. It's about the government shutdown of October 2013. I've added a couple of the slides I projected as I read it.

Shutdown

The day the government shut down

the ocean showed up for work.

They put some barricades up

but waves kept coming in, unfazed.

The toilets were locked

and the barricades went up

to stop the people coming in to the park

but we went early, before they closed

the National Seashore, and I can attest

that the seals and the pelicans

and the small fish and the birds that eat them

kept coming back for more.

The waves were giving it their all,

rending the heart of the beach in two,

throwing their violent weight around

while Congress ran aground;

the rush of foam and fuming toil

of the wind blowing spume back

from the crests as loud as the silence

along the corridors of power,

the sand hot beneath our feet,

the water silvery gold, the gulls

laughing and crying as we were

laughing and crying too.

Pelicans flew as low as they dared

we reckoned they hadn't heard

that the government was hung -

hoist by its own petard -

that they'd put some wooden barriers up

to stop the tourist cars

from visiting the National Seashore

while well beneath the roar of the breakers

tearing up the shale

and the keening wail of the gulls

the day was a good day, ungoverned,

lovely, full of miracles.