I wrote my most recent book when I wasn’t entirely sure that I’d live to see it published. Thus, it was a kind of aspirational act, a leap of faith that there would be a “me” around to read from it. I tried to collect some poems that spoke to the present, others that addressed the uncertain future, and still more that gave a glimpse of the past and some of the lost places I have inhabited that may no longer exist. It is a book full of traces, beautiful lost ghosts, and the ever-present, ongoing transcendent glory of the world.
In Paradise and Other Lost Places, I sketch through poetry the fine grain of the kind of blues we feel in local places like Bombay Beach, where in the fierce heat, “the stench of the Salton Sea” full of “fish perishing slowly” and “birds dying of an unknown disease” make it appear as “the end of the world.” But still, at the same time, we can camp in the Sierras that are not burned yet and stare up “at the endless, star filled sky/that always makes you feel/small and vast/at the same time.”
That feeling of wonder and dread is underlined even more starkly in a gorgeous place like Maui where many of the poems were written before and after the deadly blaze that devastated part of the island. There, a “a green turtle/sleeping like a drunk/with his head flopped out in front of him/and his flippers splayed by his sides as/the water slowly rippled up to kiss him” gives us a “gift of amazement” as can “the serenade of the surf/reminding us/of the simple joy/of being alive.”
But, even in paradise, we return to our rooms and see that across the world, “New York City was choking in smoke/from burning forests in Canada/The wildfires were scorching acre after acre/of pristine wilderness/that will not recover/in our lifetimes/if ever,” leaving us to ponder how, “The world is burning faster and more furiously/than even our love can repair.”
When I journeyed to Hawaii with the knowledge that I was seeing stunning birds “perhaps destined for extinction/passing through this moment in time/and blessing me with/a tragic awe,” I pondered the question: “How many precious things/will be lost/in just one lifetime?”
How then do we go on, without delusion, in the face of an uncertain future?
In “After the Fire,” I meditate on the statue of a Buddha in Lahaina that survived the inferno:
Now the Buddha sits in lonely vigil amidst the desolation on Puunoa point in sight of Lanai and Molokai inviting your gaze to the distant horizon. Never forget the transient nature of all things the Buddha’s solitary witness reminds us but also know that we are always becoming like the shoots on the scorched banyan tree down the road. No matter how hard the path in one form or another we persist.
And it is for every last bit of the beauty and wonder and love in the world that we live another day to struggle to save the radiance of everything that is.
The rest of the book is a compilation of poems, a handful from Into the Bardo, which documents my months long health crisis and slow recovery, as well as other published and new works written over 40 years of my life. Some of them, like “This Is It,” seek to capture “the beating heart of the instant,” while others offer snapshots of lost places from skid row Los Angeles, to Toledo, Detroit, Kalispell, Yuma, the Salton Sea and elsewhere.
Sometimes that lost place discovered is somewhere “A Mile Before Mecca” where “The sun was setting/low and crimson/and the desert was still/empty at the core.” Other times, it is in Corktown, the Waterfront, a long dead hotel, or simply out the window of my house in Golden Hill:
Sitting with my coffee in the back room with a view of the bottlebrush tree, I hear sirens racing towards somebody else’s pain and the sound of an airplane cruising in to land at the airport, leaving the air swirling in its wake. Then, for a moment, silence, before the voices of a gospel choir rise from the church down the street and join the birds in the tree in the backyard along with the woman humming as she takes laundry down the stairs of the apartment complex across the alley— all of them singing, beautifully together, on this fine Sunday morning.
Wherever I have found myself over nearly sixty years of life with plenty of joy, suffering, and wonder, I have never ceased to be amazed, as I write in the final poem in the collection, that “All of these lives, days, hours, moments, and more/I desire/and adore.”
I’ll be reading from Paradise and Other Lost Places and Into the Bardo on Thursday, November 21st at 7:00 PM at The Book Catapult at 3010-B Juniper Street in South Park.