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.