Below are the final five poems from the recent TweetSpeak poetry jam on Twitter. The prompts for the jam were all taken from Neruda’s Memoirs: Poems by Maureen Doallas.

By @llbarkat, @Dancinbutterfly, @mmerubies, @doallas, @jejpoet, @lschontos, @lauraboggess, @SandraHeskaKing, @amykiane and @LoveLifeLitGod. Edited by @gyoung9751.

Celestial Seizures

I seize the moon;
will the moon seize me?
God bless the moon,
God seize me.
The stars sprinkle the sky with light,
sending brilliant flashes into the night.
The moon seizes the mermaid
on her voyage to the stars.
Splashes of moonbeams on silvery tides
chase fallen stars into the night,
moonbeams that beg to be unwoven
just to reach the silver lining.
“Seize the day,” urged the ancient bard
to the boy. “Sees the day,” muttered
the moon about the sun.

Words on a Summer Night

Before you drink the red night,
before you are washed away
into the endless night,
thread your words carefully
on silken thread, praying
all the while they bring grace.
My own words did I recognize
early on but thought to hold
my tongue; regret
and bitterness ate them,
bitterness on a night
pitch black but woven.
with light from a thousand fireflies,
There is so much I would say,
could but never should say.
I’ll hold the thread
till the hills stop singing
those dreams of children
on summer nights.

In my dreams

In my dreams a blue Chinese jar
and a silver fish and mermaids
dancing with the moon
make perfect sense without
my consciousness being in the way.
I want to splash in this water,
spray the earth with silver drops
under the moon and weave together
earth and sky with drops of gold,
moonbeams melting on fins
and little silvered things.
My morning coat is blue
and white; I open it,
reveal a fin.

The White Rabbit

White rabbit it is
who took the jar
that held the elixir
that made the silver fish
shine.

Follow him down the rabbit hole;
a land filled with talking cards
and mad hatters awaits.
Why make sense
when rabbits race
and jars ting
and the hills now ring
graced with silver fish?

The elixir’s spent. What game
might then be played
to while the hours
before a rabbit dressed
in morning coat arrives.
Hahahaha laughs
the Cheshire cat, vanishing
(or avoiding).

And the queen sipped tea
and Alice longed for home
and the rabbit oh so late.
The screams of teapots
just too steamed started
a fight, a battle, white
against red that caused
poor Alice terrible dreams.

The battle nobody wins until
grief and pride and self thins.
Alice sidles to the takeout
Window, asks for fries and coke
to ease the battle but
the counter window is closed,
shut tight. Poor Alice grumped;
she’d take her lumps.

A spot of tea:
(elixir’s better)
rabbit would know
why not to snicker.
Twas our pleasure,
said the Queen,
to be re-enchanted, to listen
to the rabbit coming up for air,
no room to spare,
to take a breath between.

Fast Food Reading

Reading Goodnight Moon
is not like stopping
at McDonald’s.
Goodnight reading is
more filling than
goodnight eating.
Red balloons on burgers
float sesame seeds on buns
galumphing to the clouds.
Enjoy the meal of ketchup packets;
such kisses as Red Queen
might favor on her lips
unsullied by a coke and chips.
Who needs cents
when McDonald’s loves your lines,
will take you for 99 and
fly away on french fry wings?

Here are five additional poems from our recent poetry jam on Twitter, with prompts taken from Neruda’s Memoirs: Poems by Maureen Doallas. Something unusual happened with this group during the Twitter stream of lines; you’ll see it in the last two poems.

Alice and the Chinese Jar 4

By @doallas, @llbarkat, @jejpoet, @mmerubies, @lschontos, @lauraboggess, @LoveLifeLitGod, @amykiane, @SandraHeskaKing, @Dancinbutterfly and @bibledude. Edited by @gyoung9751.

Song of the Mermaid

My hopes and dreams seem
too big for this world;
I’m limited, cut off, yet
every song wants,
which is why I sing,
my lock of hair, wearing thin,
becoming a memory.
Didn’t you want me to hold you?
Wasn’t I cast for this very moment?
Anchor! Anchor? Why do you hold
me so tight? she cried.
And the mermaids laughed
and the fish swam
past and I wanted them,
I wanted them.
I dip my finger in the moon,
in the hair of the blue mermaid
in shadow tales, in tales of woe
The sea swallows them up in mystery.

Silver Fish

I dip my finger in the ocean
to make it rise; however
imperceptibly, I alter
the surface of the earth.
Unseen, unknown
that which is thrown returns
on the backs of silver fish.

Their tears run upon their scales
on silver backs of light, a flash
of light, a turn of tail, tales told
of depths we long to plumb.

The fish are just now swimming
up the silver creek, their silver backs
waving you on, soft flashing.
Silver fish dim, their light
beneath a moon grown heavy
The sky breathes light,
shadows dance alone.

Fireflies ride the fish,
brilliant lantern cowboys
with wings. I will catch you;
I don’t need a reel or a thread
or the dead of night
just a simple jar and
a song.

What would you hear,
in the splash of a silvery tide?

The Eye of the Moon

The falling night
brings stars unseen,
what would you see
in the eye of the moon?

I ‘d see that the eye of the moon
would see the eye of me.
I am Stella, I am star,
I am the only light
that you could ever be .

Is she fighting for me?
Is she hoping I’ll be
the one to kill our devilry?
Stella, do you fight for me?

Stars whisper songs of want,
crying out to their creator
who holds them high
to the dark night sky.
Stella Luna, your eyes are white.

White eyes
like a chalice tipped,
the moon dips out his light.
Stella catches it
in her silver chalice,

wanting what she denied, that love,
its magic might she work on one not left.
And how long before this moment
becomes yesterday and I’m forced
to catch another?

Grandma, you can have my wings
By @mmerubies

In my past, two great grandmothers, married men and birthed children. One was a midwife and chose the life/of a healer. The other woman killed the life inside herself/coat-hanger abortion/shrinking outhouse walls. Grandma, you can have my wings. These yin and yang women gave life to Stella and Willie and they birthed Frank and Frank emptied himself into me. And now I have those warring women in my mind, birthing and killing with every violent raping breath. The waiting and waiting never seems to end. You only think you have a boundary-line that keeps you from making that mistake, the one others made before you.

Heather, child, you are haunted and you know it. Stop fighting her. And just let go.

I kiss your pearly throat, when you gulp, and I whisper there are pills, pills that I can get for you. You throw these words back at me, shattering glass as they fall. But I keep whispering, and sometimes, you almost seem to listen. You wrote about the fireflies in the Mason jar, but you forgot to tell how you are trapped there with them, with their pretty lights. I have changed you, with my fingers on your skin. I have changed everything about, exactly who you are, and no one cares but me.

Grandma, are you laughing at me, knowing I am no match for the curse your Jehovah came to be?

Off meds,
obsessive brain,
perverse images stuck
and cannot be dislodged.
I trace the lines of your unscarred wrist,
and I consider slicing it. Open like a fish.
Gutted.
I won’t win though. I know I won’t win.
Even as I stroke your golden hair
and nurse at your healing breast,
I know I will lose.

I sing my song
By @Dancinbutterfly

I sing my song
of wanting to hear
little feet , a child’s
laughter.
I sing my song
of wanting to God,
wanting a house
to call my own
wanting to give
my grandparents back
all they have given to me.

Last Thursday night, there was another gathering of the tweetspeakers for a poetry jam. This time, the prompts all came from Neruda’s Memoirs: Poems by Maureen Doallas, who was one of the tweetspeaking participants.

Below are the first three poems from the jam, edited by someone named the Poem Weaver. Actually, someone else (cough – L.L. Barkat – cough – cough) named me that, and I decided it was the best job title I’ve ever had.

Alice and the Chinese Jar

By @doallas, @llbarkat, @mmerubies and @jejpoet

To make the hours race
she put elixir into
the Chinese jar, precious
oil, a garden of Eden scent,
those swirls of liquid
in the clear vase,
blue liquid, dancing
bubbles, purple stars,
asters from behind
rusted cars.

Dancing blue
she thought of you
and the asters
and the scent of Eden.
Tide in and tide out,
she knocked the vase
and watched it splash.
She beat her fists
in the blue and screamed.
But no one heard.

When the liquid grew still,
she moved instead, dancing
around the waves, wishing
for quiet inside,
swirling;
silent.

When Rage is Silence

By @llbarkat, @mmerubies, @LoveLifeLitGod, @jejpoet and @doallas

The Ocean

The ocean
rages, begs for calm,
yet when a land is silent
as an empty vase
who rages, does anyone
rage?
And when the land breaks
from drought and shatters man,
what then of rage,
rage as stars might rave?

The Land

The land I traversed two days ago
was rich with dark black soil
and my roots were reaching
down to drink, when the silver car
drove me away and now the vines
are tearing at my flesh, begging me
to go, back home again,
home to secrets
home to stars and vines
and Mississippi lands.
But I cannot go back home again.
Will it be a home?
I am falsely anchored to Mississippi
lands, with husbands hands and
children feet, clawing and curbing me.

The Ocean

The water is my home.
Pay to sip it
pay to hold it
pay to be silent?
Will the Chinese jar
hold the silence
will it fit your lip
if you try to sip
the darkness inside?

Last Secrets of the Chinese Jar

By @mmerubies, @doallas, @llbarkat, @jejpoet, @LoveLifeLitGod and @lauraboggess

Curbing my hands, my feet,
curbing my ache for home,
for its last secrets ,
plantation dreams
and old twin oaks,
I chose my trap,
my mama bear paws eagerly
taking on the silver spikes
and begging him
to close in ranks.
He did.

Who can keep a secret
when our walls are flung
into the gulf
and the gulf cries
like the hollow jar,
elixir gone,
mixed long ago and spent?
Dark water still swallows tears
and dimples light at dawn.
silence might be darkness;
darkness, temptation’s ghosts,
names of the forgotten,
and remembered.

I see a piece
with a Chinese symbol.
I don’t know what it means.
And now I pop white pills
in the new dawn, hoping
to keep the demons at bay,
the demons born in eastern hills,
with names that whisper
in my nights:
Stella.
Victoria.
Mary Jane
and Willie V.

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Maureen Doallas is an honors graduate of Vassar College, and has been a features writer and editor for more than 35 years. One of her poems is included in the Gulf of Mexico charity anthology Oil and Water… and Other Things That Don’t Mix (LL-Publications, 2010); two poems appear at Poets for Living Waters; and a third was recorded for an episode at Red Lion Square. Maureen also owns a small business, Transformational Threads, which licenses images of original fine art reproduced in custom hand-embroidery in Vietnam. She and her husband Jim Burke live in Arlington, Virginia.

Her debut collection of poetry is Neruda’s Memoirs: Poems, published earlier this year. This poem is from that collection.

Gone to Seed

Fireweed done producing,
gone to seed,

brilliance cuts a swath
through green’s shallowing shelter.

Agitated Monet yellows
burnished Van Gogh reds:
two nods to nature’s talents.

Lips of leaves
crisp
curl
cascade.

I carry a palette that can’t compete
with summer’s last firing.

If I’m lucky,
my hand will find its way
before the final fall.

Giveaway:
For National Poetry Month, we’re giving away a copy of Neruda’s Memoirs. Simply leave a comment by midnight, April 20, 2011, and your name is automatically entered. The winner will be chosen by a random drawing, and the book will be shipped directly from Amazon.com.

Related:

Peggy Rosenthal’s Image Journal review of Neruda’s Memoirs.

Review of Neruda’s Memoirs here at TweetSpeak Poetry.

Interview here at TweetSpeak Poetry.

Interview with Maureen Doallas at Faith, Fiction, Friends.

Interview with Maureen at The High Calling.

Diane Walker, a friend of Maureen’s, reads the title poem in a video for YouTube.

The stunning artwork for the book’s cover, entitled the Assumption of the Virgin, is by Randall David Tipton.

Maureen blogs at Writing Without Paper.

Maureen Doallas, author of the newly published Neruda’s Memoirs: Poems, was kind enough to talk with us about her background, her experience in writing and poetry, and related areas.

Was there a time or event or class (or person) where you knew you had come to love poetry? Was it in college or earlier?

I feel fortunate that I grew up in a house full of books. Though both my mother and father had limited educations, they knew the value of being informed and educated, and instilled in us a love of learning. My mother was and at 83 still is an omnivorous reader. She always allowed me to buy as many books from Scholastic as I wanted; I usually ordered them all. One shelf in our house contained collections of writings by Nobel Prize winners in literature and I read every one. I have the books now. The range of books we had included everything from history to short stories. We had also what I recall were first editions of fiction writers (I read Le Carre’s The Spy Who Came In From the Cold when I was still in grammar school). Not so much poetry, except for volumes common to any library sold door to door in the late ’50s and early ’60s.

I would say that my interest in poetry became most serious when I began to study Spanish in 7th grade and discovered Pablo Neruda and other great Spanish poets. I carried that interest into studies in Spanish and Italian in college.

You spent a long career in writing and editing (and how you find things online is simply amazing). Do you think this has shaped your poetry?

I started out as a reporter for a local newspaper and then did freelancing for a time until I needed to earn a higher and more stable income. I have a background for both government and private institutions in editing political, educational, international health care, and employment law publications. I also wrote many newsletter articles in the job from which I retired.

I think I am skilled at mining for information. Partly that’s because I’m not content to ask the same questions others might and partly because I’m curious. In college I learned how to write book-length manuscripts based on notes taken on 3″x5″ cards, and we were required to use only primary (original) sources. I worked while in college for several professors who depended on my ability to gather information.

I wouldn’t say that what I did for a living shaped my poetry. My breadth of interests and curiosity, however, certainly informed what I read. I was and continue to be drawn to biography, and I like to write or try to write poems that draw on real-life facts.

How has writing shaped you as a person?

There is no period in my life when I haven’t been writing something, so in that respect, writing shaped my life because it’s always been a part of my life as an adult. What’s funny is that when I was in grade school I wanted to be a musician. I even entered a Mattel Corp. essay contest in which I wrote about how much I loved music. I think I was 9 at the time, and my essay earned finalist status. It was then that I realized I my strengths were in writing. Being a poet wasn’t what I had in mind. I wanted to be a war correspondent or at least a great newspaper reporter. After that, I pursued writing and did the requisite stint on my high school newspaper, where I was assistant editor and something of a renegade.

I took up formal study of poetry in college, though then one couldn’t major in a “craft,” as it was called, so my English studies at Vassar necessarily and primarily were in subjects like Chaucer, Shakespeare and medieval narrative. I got to bypass all the required freshman English courses, thanks to writing samples I’d submitted. I took my first poetry class in sophomore year. My instructor was a Sylvia Plath scholar and all the others students were juniors and seniors; I was intimidated but held in there. My senior year work – in poetry, my first manuscript – was with a fabulous and much-loved professor. I continued to write poetry after graduating, sharing my work for a while with my professor. I married in my 30s, in 1984, and had my son in 1988. I wrote and edited all day while at work and when I got home rarely took up my creative writing except for writing poetry for special occasions. In 2007, after retiring, I went back to poetry-writing seriously.

Do you have favorite poets? Do you read mostly contemporary poets or also the poets of the past?

I read broadly and deeply, so it’s difficult to say I favor poets in my reading; I take something from every poet I read. However, if I could take only two with me to a desert island, the two probably would be Pablo Neruda and Mahmoud Darwish, and, for good measure, Rumi. I would have to say I am most drawn to modern and contemporary poets.

Can you recall the first poem you read or had read to you?

I cannot recall the first poem read. I have a lousy memory for that kind of thing.

You have a tremendous love for art. How do you think that has influenced your poetry?

Poetry goes hand in hand with life. I can’t imagine not reading poetry any more than I can imagine living without visual and other forms of art. They are different media for expression but both show and teach a way to see.

Educational and career background?

I was born in Arlington County, Virginia. I’m one of those rare “natives” you hear about in the Washington, D.C., area. I grew up in Fairfax County. I applied to only three colleges/universities: Barnard College in New York City (now part of Columbia), University o f Missouri journalism school, and Vassar College. I was fortunate to have my pick of the three and settled on Vassar because the campus is extraordinarily beautiful and is a short train ride to New York City, because it had and has a magnificent history of educating women of incredible achievement, and it offered me a scholarship. I nixed Barnard because I wanted no part of looking for housing on my own and was not offered a scholarship, and Missouri because I decided I didn’t want to be at a large institution where fraternities and sororities had importance. As it turned out, I went to Vassar at a time when the college was becoming co-ed; I knew two years of what could be described as the “old” Vassar, when there were mostly women on the campus, and two years when the presence of men was creating all kinds of change.

I was a features reporter for a local paper and freelanced after college. I also worked summers at Wolf Trap Farm Park for the Performing Arts. The first year after college I lived with my brother in Virginia. When I saved enough money to get out on my own, I began a long career in editing and writing. I worked first for a group associated with Georgetown University, next for an education-related organization that undertook projects with U.S. colleges and universities, next with an international public health organization for which I edited international health program papers and project reports that went primarily to USAID and the UN, and finally to an employment law publisher where I spent almost 25 years. There was no poetry in the work but I still have friends from those jobs and made a good living applying my writing and editing skills.

Related:

Maureen talks more about the poems and her background at The High Calling.

She also discusses the process of publishing the book at Faith, Fiction, Friends.

Review of Neruda’s Memoirs at TweetSpeak Poetry.

Diane Walker, a friend of Maureen’s, reads the title poem in a video she created for the book.

The Assumption of the Virgin by Randall David Tipton is the art used for the cover of Neruda’s Memoirs. (It’s also available as a limited edition print.)

You know how it can be with expectations. You wait and wait and wait for something, and then when it comes, you feel slightly deflated, because the expectation was bigger than the reality.

That didn’t happen with Neruda’s Memoirs: Poems by Maureen Doallas. In fact, just the opposite happened. The reality exceeded my expectations, and by a wide margin. (If it hadn’t, I wouldn’t be saying this.)

What do you expect from a first collection of poetry? Not this. Not this polish or precision. Not this range of feeling. Not this strong grasp of language, themes, words and range.

This is not a collection of poems by someone new to poetry. This is a collection by someone who knows her way around, someone well read, and yes, well-versed.

The collection, edited by Marcus Goodyear, is comprised of four sections – Enter, Listen, Exit and Remember. Each is introduced by a short essay, and each informs the poems in the specific section. The poems don’t necessarily need the introductory essays, but they become richer as a result. And they help the reader understand that this collection comes from a profound loss for the poet, the death of her brother in 2009.

To see how Doallas chisels words with precision, consider “Gone to Seed:”

Fireweed done producing,
gone to seed,

brilliance cuts a swath
through green’s shallowing shelter.

Agitated Monet yellows
burnished Van Gogh reds:
two nods to nature’s talents.

Lips of leaves
crisp
curl
cascade.

I carry a palette that can’t compete
with summer’s last firing.

If I’m lucky,
my hand will find its way
before the final fall.

The beauty of words matches the images they evoke. Doallas often combines references to nature and art, and here she uses them almost interchangeably to a full effect.

The poems cover, among many other themes and ideas,  faith, reading a children’s story, Mother’s Day, a son turning 22, news events, public tragedies and what might be called “interiors,” the thinking parts of the mind, heart and soul. From “To be Re-enchanted is Uneasy,” one of many favorites in this collection:

To be re-enchanted is uneasy
with an unquiet mind
holding on to daily reminders
of what you’re about to lose
you imagine you’ve lost already

Moment and moment and moment
choking away unaccounted for
as you, sitting as on watch,
join sentinels all praise-worn
and too quick to gather for the left-behind
before the gone are gone

And then there’s that intense sense of loss, the loss of a beloved brother, whose illness and death led Doallas to begin writing the poetry she’d left behind in college. Poetry became more than therapy; it became a way to explicate illness and death. From “Grief’s Lessons:”

I’ve learned to rock my grief
   inside, the way a doctor’s fingers,

all rubber-gloved smoothness, gently massage
   the chest cavity open before reaching in to expose

the raw fist-sized metronome that keeps
   keeping our time perfectly, even after

the skins cracks and the bones, ossified,
   turn porous and hollow, more a sieve

for questions than a sarcophagus for answers…

I read that poem four times, and each time the meaning deepened. This is something common to all the poems in this collection: they become finer with successive readings, and I suspect that when I read this volume again, they will have aged well.

It’s a stunning collection, combining beauty, grace and heart.

Related:

Diane Walker, a friend of Maureen Dallas, reads the title poem from the collection in a video Diane created.

The cover art for the volume, Assumption of the Virgin, was painted bv Randall David Tipton and is available as a limited edition print.

Maureen blogs at Writing Without Paper.

Diane Walker, a friend of poet Maureen Doallas, reads the title poem from Maureen’s recently published Neruda’s Memoirs: Poems. (Diane created the video, too.)

Maureen Doallas is a regular participant in our poetry jams on Twitter, and the author of blog Writing Without Paper. Her online eye ranges over a vast array of art, poetry and culture, and she freely shares what she she finds with the rest of us.

T.S. Poetry Press has just published (“just” as in yesterday) Maureen’s first book of poems, Neruda’s Memoirs. The editor was Marcus Goodyear, senior editor at The High Calling and author of Barbies at Communion: and other poems. And the godmother of Neruda’s Memoirs is L.L. Barkat, author of InsideOut: Poems.

I ordered my copy of Neruda’s Memoirs as soon as it opened on Amazon. In the near future, we will have a review here and links to interviews with Maureen.

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.)