​
IN IRELAND, WITH OR WITHOUT MY MOTHER
 
                                       
Is it enough to call her
the refreshment of Glencar waterfall,
air that cools and eases my ache,
 the mossy stones that lead me there?
Is it enough to call her the furrowed green
of Ben Bulben, patched with low mist
and cloud, then light-struck again?
Might she be these arrow-tailed magpies sweeping past,
these gorse bushes chiming everywhere with gold?
Or these stars, these irrepressible stars
brighter than belief in the night?  

(forthcoming in Mothershell, Kelsay Books)



NOTE: John Keats is one of my literary and spiritual loves.  Several years ago I embarked on a pilgrimage to Hampstead, where he lived from 1818-1819 and where he wrote some of his greatest works, including “Ode to a Nightingale.”   The first time I went, his house was closed for renovations; I was deeply disappointed but vowed to return. And I did. In this poem, I wanted to keep alive the feeling and the memory of the route it takes to find him.  


HOW TO FIND KEATS
Hampstead, London

Take Hampstead High Street before dusk,
then left on Downshire Hill, one block until
St. John's Church where you'll veer to the right,
follow the narrow stone-flagged walk
to Wentworth Place, gated and locked for renovation
for much too long now, but still you must come
because it happens on this street--the living year, the year
of the great odes--the blue darkening turns fluent
with birdsong, everywhere their notes
become like cursive crisscrossing,
inscribing the air, ancestral
nightingales--they have taken up his song.

(published in An Ink Like Early Twilight, Salmon Poetry, 2015)I am a Madison, Wisconsin poet and a longtime bookseller at an independent bookstore.  I always draft my poems in longhand, and am addicted to buying unlined notebooks with smooth, creamy pages.  My latest poetry collections are A Stone to Carry Home (Salmon Poetry) and Arrows of Light (Iris Press).  A new collection, Mothershell.  is due out from Kelsay Books in the fall of 2019.


Note: Two years after my mother’s passing, I returned to Ireland.  The last time I’d been to Ireland my mother was nearing the end, although I could not let myself know it then.  This trip to Yeats country in Sligo, and to County Donegal, I embarked upon eagerly, to feel her presence in the mystical, ancient and beautiful landscapes.   I found her everywhere.