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.