Maureen Doallas is one of our regular contributors to the Tweetspeak Poetry-sponsored poetry jams on Twitter. She writes beautiful words, and not just poetry. She blogs at Writing Without Paper, where she covers poetry, art and culture in general – and covers them comprehensively and with great depth and insight.

Below are two of Maureen’s poems. One was written for her brother, Patrick William Doallas, who died of cancer on May 5, 2009. This poem was read at his funeral mass. The other was written as a “place” or “address” poem for a recent Random Act of Poetry challenge at the High Callings Blogs, but it is actually an elegy for her father.

For National Poetry Month, two beautiful poems by Maureen Doallas.

Reunions: Brother, May 5, 2009

I won’t know the details
to play back your timeline.

Not the hour of death. Maybe not the place.
Certainly not the words you couldn’t say.

You won’t be buried on a hill
where water runs down, not into, hallowed ground.

Rules binding grief are for the living
not the dead.

I won’t be able to find you
in the oldest part of the cemetery
since the Civil War.

Your wife won’t get a folded flag.
We won’t hear Taps
or the snap-to volleys of 21-gun salutes.

You won’t have a headstone
remarking the deaths of the brother and sister
none of us knew.

You won’t lie next to Audie Murphy.

The battle you fought won’t be documented.
You didn’t die because of wounds
suffered in military action.

Your full name won’t go on a v-shaped wall
where widows rub paper on reflective stone,
daughters tell of beaus, and sons just want to forget.

You were 4F when your brother,
two years older, was crashing APCs
and dodging agent orange.

You were nobody prominent: Not an explorer
or a president. Not a general or an admiral.
Not a Supreme Court justice. Not a literary
or medical figure. Not a minority.
And never a famous woman.

You were nobody found deserving of honors.

You are just somebody I love.

© Maureen E. Doallas. All Rights Reserved. Used with permission.

Reunions: Father July 18, 1990

Scene 1: 2909 North Nottingham Street

The clock set at 4:15 p.m.
Before 4:30 I lost you
in a chiming of ever-closer sirens.

From you to phone to glass door I
watched for that blur of red
— rose-deep, a harder color than I want to remember —
screaming to come clear.

Help in a red and white wagon pushing
for last tries before unlasting breaths.

The pulse punishes the memory, the adrenaline
maxing out when you need it most.

The noise was a pain.
Everywhere for seven minutes before
then suddenly here where it had to be.

My hands to my ears,
automatic-like, did no one any good.

I didn’t expect the rescue in front of me to go bad.

I didn’t want to be in control

Of a 63-year-old woman panicking
and my not-yet two-year-old urging,
Grandpa get up! Grandpa get up!

This is the part
of the parts I never reacted to:

How a half-dozen volunteers arrived
in less than eight minutes

How they rolled up a corner
of the antique Persian carpet

How they pulled you
from the bathroom where you collapsed
to the place we call the living room

Where they used mouth-to-mouth
— so much better were they than I —
and shot you up to trick your heart into rising again

How they couldn’t wait
to stash the detritus of their care

How I couldn’t wipe away the sticky pool of cells
absorbing our newly refinished floor

How it was over
and then just began

A neighbor I had not let in
saying, Go. Don’t give it any mind.
I’ll take care of it. And the baby.

(Did I forget about the baby?)

Scene 2: 1701 North George Mason Drive

I, in front with the driver,
you, Dad, in back,
an EMT still doing his best
to keep your beat to the beat.

In Emergency, before I quit
telling them I couldn’t sign any papers,
you, alone in some cubicle with a doctor
making decisions of his own, were already gone.

Kept busy answering for information
not one of us had, I cycled all the numbers
from Jacksonville, to Venice, and Ft. Myers, Florida
to Indiana, Kentucky, and Bethpage, Tennessee

Startled into starting all over again
when a nurse hushed us to a private room.

The news was changed.

I couldn’t have prepared for
the difference I saw
in you

Cleaned up, that sheet of antiseptic white
giving no hint of the way
your chest had been pounded.

Lifelines removed, your eyes stiller,
the curtains on their rolling rings
shutting in a private moment

A wife somewhere carrying on.

We were together
one last time before our last time.

How much time
was enough time
to be with you?

Cases waited. They needed the space.

Someone asked about organ donations.
Someone else said you were too old

To give up
anything but your corneas.

I asked what you’d want. Your license didn’t say.

On the way out I took in hand
a brown paper bag, more fragile than the satchel
we lug groceries in. More plain than the kind for tidying
papers we bundle every Wednesday.

T-shirt. Socks (no match: you were color-blind).
Black shoes? (A guess.) Belt. Billfold.
Watch worn since retirement.

Left over
Left out
Left for.

What I have of you still
I hold in safe-keeping

Your watch keeping its own time.

© 2010 Maureen E. Doallas. All Rights Reserved. Used with permission.

Postings and news updates:

Writer Amy Sorrells wrote “Bone Against Stone” for National Poetry Month.

Yesterday’s Poem A Day from the Academy of American Poets was “Fireflies” by Fred Chappell, from his work Shadow Box: Poems, published by LSU Press.

Last summer, I drove to a high school in a central St. Louis suburb for a writing and publishing fair. Seminars were held inside the school; the parking lot had been cordoned off for booths, demonstration areas and even a children’s playground. I wandered around the large number of booths, and then came to one that looked rather forlorn – a simple set-up of boards and posts, little decoration and one man about my age with a hopeful expression on his face.

I looked at the plain sign, which read “Missouri’s Poet Laureate.” And then I did something I’m not known for doing: I walked right up to Walter Bargen and introduced myself. You see, I had read two books of his poetry, and I wanted to meet the man who wrote them and was the first person named poet laureate for the state (his term just expired; his replacement is David Clewell). He already had a reputation as an unabashed proponent of poetry and new poets, doing countless readings and talks and school visits. And for no pay; the state did, however, cover his travel expenses.

We talked about the two books of his that I had read. He seemed absolutely thrilled with the conversation, likely because I was the sole visitor at the time but also, I think, because I knew some of his work, especially his collection of prose poems entitled Theban Traffic.

I remember my first words after I introduced myself. “Jake and Stella,” I said, referring to the two characters featured in the work. Bargen smiled and nodded. “This is going to sound odd, but reading about them –“ I hesitated while he waited patiently – “well, reading about Jake is like looking in a mirror.”

And so we talked, for a good 30 minutes. As we did, more people walked up and joined the conversation. I looked over the books he had for sale, and bought two I didn’t have. He autographed both, and for one – The Feast – he drew a picture of a fork, spoon and plate. I finally walked away, leaving behind some lively talk.

Now Bargen has published Days Like This Are Necessary: New & Selected Poems. The volume includes many I’ve previously read in Theban Traffic and The Feast, but many more I have not. Reading them all together is to gain a deep appreciation for the poet’s overall body of work.

Bargen writes about relationships – between husbands and wives, within families, and even more broadly, between cultures. I was surprised to see how much of his recent work was shaped by events in the Mideast, especially the war in Iraq and the civil war in Lebanon, and how he merges wars in the Mideast with day-to-day American life:

Beirut

Machine guns inhabit the rooftops
like hungry crows.
bullets peck the library
city hall the cobble streets
Allah’s forehead.

To the east
mountains belch dust
as artillery fires into the city
planting the bloom of brown orchids
on the beach apartments
on the Hilton
in courtyards filled
with the shattered rosary of bricks.

People are opening their bodies
for the world to read
the print still wet and so red
it pours out a stoplight
on Broadway and Ninth
in downtown Columbia, Missouri.

I’ve stood at Broadway and Ninth in downtown Columbia, but I never imagined blood pouring from the stoplight. Bargen does more than that here, of course – he invites us to imagine small-city America as a kind of Beirut.

He also tells stories, stories of death and loss that become stories of life, as he does in “Inventories of Ruin:”

Even the crooked is straight at any one
instant, when there’s no forward
or going back, no sideways to consider,
just as the asphalt beyond making capricious
turns. How it goes on or ends without us,
as it did Friday when night sped past
the overturned Ford that clowned
somersaults over the median, tossing
those drunk on immortality to the pavement
and ditch…

Bargen turns the story of a car accident into a life story, the wreckage of the car coming to symbolize the wreckage of a life.

And then there’s the story of Jake and Stella, told in Theban Traffic and included here. Bargen uses the prose poem form to explain who they are and unfold a story of two people who love each other but always seem to find themselves disconnected. From “New Waves on Old Water:”

Stella travels two thousand miles to sweep up the dust of another
relative. Whole mountain ranges pass below her quicker than
dreams. She perches on the edge of a continent.

Because they cannot see each other, they cannot exchange diseases
though the distant unease is worse. Though they cannot share a
bottle of wine their separate glasses overflow with a blush of light.
there is a smeared stain in the air like a burning city. Over the
phone, he hears her say that’s the sun setting over the Pacific…

There is distance here, and even alienation, but there is also the strong sense of longing and affection. All of the Jake and Stella poems reflect this, almost clutching the contradiction of love and simultaneous separation, even when they’re together.

These are quiet poems, meant to be read in quiet. This collection is impressive, and goes far beyond any need to explain why Bargen was selected to champion poetry in his home state.

(Maureen Doallas has made Walter Bargen a subject of one of her marvelous articles, posting it on her blog, Writing Without Paper. To get an in-depth look at Bargen and his poetry, visit her blog – you’re in for a real treat.)

Maureen Doallas joined our Tweet Party group, and jumped right in. This is one of her poems that she’s published in her blog, and it’s aboutt remembering New Orleans. This is part of our new feature to share poems by our Tweet Party contributors.

Maureen Doallas

www.twitter.com/doallas

http://writingwithoutpaper.blogspot.com/2009/11/we-can-remember-poem.html

We Can Remember

We can remember

wafting roasting chicory root
steam-driven cafe au lait
beignets by fistfuls
on a randy French corner.

We can remember

serendipity’s tune
getting loose from back pockets
in a Bourbon Street dive

and Jean Lafitte look-alikes
making the rounds
as day broke day
by day.

We can remember

a jumble of shrimps and crabs
oysters and crawfish
curried and bisqued
for a magician’s pittance
— or a dreamy pirate’s scowl.

We can remember

white columns stretching
to hold the shade for
southern belles’ beauty
on morns too-bright
with hissing Bayou heat.

We can remember

the storm coming
the water rising
the levees crumbling
the refinery leaking
the wondering squall
of need

for everything
worth having.

We can remember
watching eyes watching
for hope
getting lost in hope
never arriving

early enough
or at all.

We can remember

loss
granting no claim
on those who
could forget
would still forget
do forget

a city
a ward
a block
a house
a home
troubled by mud
mold-stormed and mucked
stuck in the caw of
some southern politician’s memories.

We can remember

it was a place to be
once

where po’ boys
might speak
some lazy approximation
of French

and delicate young ladies
wave triangles
of fine lace hankies
to their suitors’ sway.

We can remember
New Orleans
yet

as it never will be
again

where a river channeled
gained its own control
over man’s made things

and not even bleach
could recover
what water rinsed
what water washed
what water wasted
in

a city
a ward
a block
a house
a home

left behind

for the asking.

Copyright 2009 Maureen E. Doallas. All Rights Reserved. Used with Permission.