How Are So Many Italians Still Alive?

This is the first line of the novel I just finished a first draft of. Nobody is more surprised than I am at the speed with which this book came spooling out. 48 days from first line to first draft, 90k words and 260 pages later. I averaged 2,000 words a day, and that was writing during the night, early mornings, late evenings, any time I could find around my full time job.

It's ten years since I wrote a novel. My first was published in 1999, the next three, all written during the first decade of this century, made it varying degrees up the publishing ladder courtesy of my agent, but none made the cut with any publisher, so by 2008, as the world economy collapsed, I felt my career as a novelist was probably in a downward spiral too. I loved all my books and had had untold amounts of fun and joy writing them, but three just felt like too many manuscripts to have languishing in the proverbial drawer, so I concentrated on my poetry instead and put out two more books of that in the following years.

This summer, on a wildly extravagent and gorgeous holiday in Italy, two characters formed in my head. I had them meet at the farmhouse hotel where I myself was staying in Orvieto, Umbria. That said, Cass my main female character is not me. Yes, she's a hospice nurse, because I know about that and really wanted to write about it. And yes, she's on holiday in Italy with her daughter and the daughter's boyfriend, as I was. But the parallels stop there.

Hugh, the main character, has been in my head for many years in various forms. I wrote about a Hugh in my first novel, and this Hugh is similar, but not the same in several key ways. This character developed strongly during my many hours lying by the pool in Orvieto or wandering the streets of Italian hilltowns. By the time I left Italy, I knew I had to write a novel about him. Four days after I got home, I decided that the only way to get the book writtten was to start writing. Brilliant, no?

Usually, I prepare for a novel by taking some serious notes. I write about the characters in various scenarios that may or many not make it into the book, just to get to know them better. What would they do in some fictitious situation? How would they react? How do they talk, think? What are their hopes, dreams, secrets that maybe I will not even divulge in the book?

This time, I just started writing from some notes I had put down in my diary of the vacation. And I couldn't stop. Seven weeks later, I had a manuscript. Now to find an agent! My previous agent relationship died of natural causes, so I'm on the search for a new one, with a couple of promising leads so far. Then, if I find an agent interested, and they think it could sell in the current market (always a mysterious thing) the long process of rewrites, rewrites, more rewrites, and hurrying up to wait.

I am so close to this book I have no vestige of objectivity about whether anyone else but me will enjoy it. However, even if nobody does, or if they like it but don't feel it will sell, the adrenaline rush of writing it, the small-hours frenzies of typing, the excitement of waiting all day to come home and write after work...I wouldn't have missed all that for anything. Maybe if this one goes nowhere, I have another in me! Guess I just have to take another Italian vacation to find out...

Sixteen

Sixteen years ago today, I was giving birth and Jessie was entering the world, feet first and ready to run about the place sewing havoc and delight. I started writing mom poems when she was about a year old and I was just beginning to sleep more than ten minutes at a time. I could barely see straight, but I realized that her life was already speeding up (a year old! how could that be?!?) and I had better start scribbling down some thoughts about it.
The Call was my first poem about being a mom and reading it now is pretty interesting, with Jessie half way through high school, and already gone so much I have to schedule a birthday breakfast with her. In many great and varied ways, she's already my flown one. In a lot of comforting ways, she's still right here, sleeping in the next room, about to wake up sixteen.
For good measure, I have also included below "Approaching Eight," a poem that now neatly marks the halfway point of her life.
Happy birthday, fabulous girl!

The Call

The fall winds covered my bed with a sheet of leaves;

drought in much of the country, fires already.

I was dry in my skeleton, old bones

crackling in their sleep beneath the duck down,

dreams like teasing sheep’s wool through a dark hole.

I thought I was a member of ordinary time,

two Sundays after the Ascension, or was it the Assumption?

but then she was here, new under the sun;

she examined every leaf, one by one by one;

she rolled on the bed laughing, and I joined in.

Hail to her, and sunlight, and spirit songs.

She bends the back of the wind and lets it go

so it springs forward with a shower of bright stars.

I touch her tiny shoulder blades as a gentle reminder –

she’ll be my flown one; I will call after her

and my call will go higher and higher

till it’s just air and only dolphins hear it. 

Approaching Eight

For Jessie.

At first light

you get in your little boat,

it's tippy, and there's no-one on the shore,

nobody waving.

In a photo of a million faces

I could find your face.

My finger would be drawn to it,

even if I didn't look.

I never thought

eight would be so fragile,

so delicate, so robust, such a synthesis,

a symphony, a gallery full of

astonishing art. For my part,

now and then

I see where I held the brush.

So off you go in your wooden boat

with the warped oars and peeling paint.

I won't stand guard on the shore.

I won't even peek

from the top window of the house

as you punt inexpertly round the lagoon.

I will close the door of an inner room;

and when you come home

with a crab's leg you found for me,

still dripping, faintly clicking,

we'll have cinnamon toast

and tea.

You'll clamber on my knee

all elbows and long toes.

I might murmur,

Have fun on the water?

and you'll nod, not mentioning

how grown up it felt, how scary,

that moment when the oar

rode up, what a relief

to make it back to shore,

how tomorrow you want more.

And for a while

in the quiet ticking

of our allotted time,

we won't do anything

together, but you will sit

enchanted vigil with your life

and I with mine.

Took my daughter for a late night drive in Point Reyes last week. We both love to drive around the county at night, out by the Nicasio Reservoir, along Platform Bridge Road back to Olema, east through Samuel P. Taylor Park and the San Geronimo Valley, and back home to Fairfax. About an hour round-trip. Enough time to listen to 20 great songs, talk a bit, and generally encounter some wildlife. This night it was a fox, who ran across the road in front of the car near Taylor Campground. When I got home, having struggled with two hospice poems for weeks, I wrote this piece, all in one go. After being bogged down in not one but two recalcitrant poems, the short lines and simplicity of a fox poem were liberating.

Luminous

Almost

hit a fox

on my way home.

He ran out

small

pale brown

bushy guy

zig-zagging

in the headlights.

I swerved.

I was a

house on fire

he didn’t burn

a flood

he stayed dry.

He stayed alive

despite my

XJ8 killing machine.

I’m in my house now

and he’s free

running between trees

by the stream

awake

in his fantastic dream

alive and free

in

spite

of

me.

He might even be

curled up small

breathing

evenly

dreaming

of the luminous

whites

of a human’s eyes.

Last summer I went on a backpacking trip to Lake Eleanor with my daughter and friends. We hiked four miles in to where there were only occasional other humans - some boyscouts on a far shore whose campfire was kind of comforting to see at night, and a few folks who kayaked in to our inlet. I wrote a fragment of a poem about swimming there, heading out into the lake further than I was really comfortable going, across to a spit of sand. Halfway across I started having lots of thoughts about drowning. So it was a bit victorious to clamber up the shaly sand of the spit and look back over the water I had crossed. The fragment I wrote about that day lay dormant in my notebook for months. Something about striking out bravely. Something about pushing through fear.
As I reworked it the other night, I added a fire, and then the fire burned through all the driftwood I had amassed as a shelter. I thought about how we try to protect ourselves from the forces we fear, how fragile those 'protections' often turn out to be, and ultimately how liberating it can be to watch them fall or get consumed by the very forces we feared, and realize that we are still alive, still standing.
This winter in California was fairly brutal. After years of drought, record rainfall brought hillsides crashing down, destroyed homes, and forced many road closures. In concert with the weather, I was enduring a giant mudslide in my own life.
Spring has dawned, supremely welcome and, as though a special reward for all those storms, bringing with it the most fabulous wildflower season. I'm hardly an original pairing Spring with feelings of hope and rebirth, but that's what is happening in my house right now and when I finally reworked that fragment into a full poem between 3 and 5am the other night, these are the themes that emerged: not only facing adversity, but learning to embrace and learn from it; opening yourself out to optimism and possibility after a period of hunkering down; allowing light in after all the darkness.

Grace

"What will survive of us is love."
                          - Philip Larkin

I swam from the shore to the sandy spit

and on the way I dreamed of drowning

but I swam through the fear;

I walked up on the shaly sand

and my life was waiting for me there;

I lit a fire, violent at its heart,

it burned with ease through the driftwood

I had piled up as a shelter from the dark.

We came from desert,

moved through perpetual rain

that liquified the parched hills

and brought them tumbling down

with houses, trees, power lines;

as fast as everything fell apart

the good green world poured out

her liquid heart into the flood

and when the power went out

and the batteries ran down

I learned to wrap both arms

around the liferaft of the dark;

I learned that it’s about

not being swallowed by the night,

that it’s about letting the night storm

on and on, till out of a blue dawn, grace

a world washed clean and calm,

and look now! April comes sailing in,

creaming over the sandbars with her

wildflowers in jamjars and her sudden

fern forests taller than a man, no more

anguish in the night, she turns

cold love inside out till you

can scarcely bear the heat

and the doors that were being pushed shut,

the doors are opening now, each day

in its own way a preparation.

If what will survive of us is love

then I will open too, I will allow the white

froth of trees, the four falling notes

of the mourning dove and the high

white clouds to make me unafraid,

For we are round the brighter side

of the sun, every revolution takes us

further from the Fall chill, the Winter

wet and stripped. Space opens up,

there’s room for promise and for hope,

and though my fear was clean, and meant

something, I get up every morning now

and I laugh as I shrug the wings on.

Ok, so I'm a hospice nurse and it's all about death

After years of writing poems about death but not really wanting to admit to it lest I be considered a one trick pony, I have finally come out with it and written a poem about being a hospice nurse. The title is "Hospice Nurse." Subtle, I know. But I figure if you have mud on your face your might as well admit to having mud on your face.

Actually, it was liberating to write about death as Something. A persona. A Thing. Which I very often think of and experience it as, in the course of my ordinary (or not so ordinary) everyday (or not so everyday) work.

Last week, I took on a patient who was very near the end of his life. His wife, who had been married to him for 27 years and adored him (a second marriage for both of them, their kids were all grown when they married, and they exulted in one another's company, traveled together, and generally had a whale of a time together for nearly 3 decades) was not nearly ready to admit that he was dying. I spent my first visit with them just trying to manage his symptoms and give her some kind of idea of how to administer the medications he needed. When she said "he might get better, right?" I tried not to bring her down to earth too violently. After all, it was my first time meeting him and her, and I wasn't sure of anything. The next morning, I was completely sure. He was well on his way to dying, and I had to tell her that. I crouched down beside her chair so she was looking down at me (a  position I always find most comfortable when I have really bad news to break): "Jean (not her real name)," I said gently, "he's not going to get better. This is it, he's dying. I'm so sorry Jean but you are going to lose him now."

Three days and seven visits later, he stopped breathing, at 4:45 on Friday afternoon. I stayed with Jean till about 6:30, filling in the paperwork for her to donate his body to science, and typing up an email to all their friends that she dictated, telling them that her beloved husband had just died and asking them to hold their happiest memory of him in their hearts. You don't get much closer to a person, and yet I'd only met her three days before.

On my weekends, I need to get a little distance from death. One good way to do this is to drive out to the beach and sit looking at the ocean. This Sunday, my 15.5-year-old newly permitted daughter drove me proudly out to Stinson Beach and we sat together watching the surfers get trashed by the high tide waves. I saw a 2-year-old boy kneeling staring quietly in the sand and I thought of my patient and how his spirit might very well be kneeling in that fine sand staring out to sea and bidding farewell to his life here on the land. So I wrote this poem for him and for his wonderful, brave, strong, pragmatic wife.

Hospice Nurse

When I show up for death

I take off my thousand pound weight

so I go in light

and I wait

there by the bedside

for death to look up.

There’s family: a daughter,

a wife, a son flown in

from the East Coast

and death thinks this is all

so fine, he has the elixir

for the dying man

in his coat, in the pocket

of his heavy coat.

But I am the hospice nurse

and I have something too

I have a comfort kit

for when death decides

to really come out with it

the twenty-one gun salute

the frothing

at the mouth.

After I lay down my cloak

for the dying man

and the son calls out “Dad!

dad! it’s me!”

it’s not good

or bad

but he can’t hear him,

he can’t hear any of them

he is on his knees in the fine sand

staring out to sea.

In my last post, I mentioned the 'sweet heady rush of writing poems.' I've spent most of today in that space: on the couch (still getting over flu) working on a poem that started to come together on December 26th when I wrote the first four lines and a fragment of the next few:

A poem about how my life has dramatically changed in the past few months, with emphasis on the happy, the optimistic, because really, hope seems to me the only possible response right now on all levels of what is going on around me.

On the 29th, the next time I worked on it, the notion of jumping: metaphor for how it felt to leave my marriage in September. The sunrises over the city were replaced with unfamiliar tracks in the snow:

I added some flags, some bugle sounds, some red balloons - signs of joy and life and celebration that I see as key to the surviving the human condition.

Today, taking it up again with the distinct feeling that I had it in me to finish it, the work was inspired by a single line from a snatch of conversation overheard in a cafe this morning. Someone said that around midnight in the city last night (New Year's Eve) there were fireworks and a gunshot. I don't know why, but this single phrase worked its way into a poem where it doesn't even really seem to belong, at a point where i was losing focus, and took it in a new direction. The journey down takes up the long second stanza. It's full of hope: there are the flags (now candy striped), bugles, balloons, there's the light going and coming back, and then there's the gunshot, and at the moment in the poem where I have to land, I hit the ground and run. The image is meant to be a shock, a jolt, and yet to give the impression that I have hit the ground running. Leaving was shocking as a gunshot. But you can't stay still for a moment. You have to keep moving.

The poem has its title now (I called it "Fireworks and a Gunshot" for a while, enamored of the image, but it's a poem about taking my wedding rings off, not, after all, about fireworks or a random gunshot.) The second stanza is complete and giving me an opening to explore what happened when I hit the ground, where I ran to.

The last two stanzas came pretty quickly with very little rewriting. The rings come off, and there's the light, the illumination, the warm rooms of my new home that I have found for me and my daughter.

 The "Looking back" stanza needs to be the last, but it's fragmented and too long. I realize I want it to be four lines, to mirror the four lines of the first stanza both in length and subject. I've realized they are my own tracks in the snow. I want to end on a note of celebration - I know the last words should be "my brave new year" but I need something brief and powerful before them. Finally, I get it. Here's the reworked last stanza:

The end of fear. Wishful thinking, but a nice solid idea to end with. So here's the finished poem:

Rings Off

My life is another country now,

there are unfamiliar tracks in the snow, there are

fields of grain that burn, there is frost

that rises into mist in the December sun.

When I jumped,

I thought there would be broken bones, I thought

there would be severe weather on the way down.

I didn’t step or fall, I launched, and instead

it seemed the air was all

that held me there in its open arms.

The reservoirs of the human heart sent up their candy

striped flags, their bugle sounds, their red balloons.

As I came down I saw the light leave the town

and I saw the promise of light return in the pre-dawn,

all of that, the endless circular goings-on of the globe

and at midnight, fireworks and a gunshot,

and I hit the ground,

and I ran.

My rings are off, they are in the

tiny silver box I set aside for them

and here come the twelve bands of light

all the way from ultraviolet to infrared

taking me from utter darkness

to this ousized pale star in the dark

illuminating the warm rooms of my house.

Looking back I see now

those are my tracks in the snow, this is my exotic

garden of cloud out beyond the shadow of doubt,

my eulogy to fear, my brave new year.