That's an interesting question, because I don't really think about any of these poems being about home per se, and for me, home is more of an emotional place than a physical one. My poems are usually more about interpersonal relationships than setting. However, I am very sensitive to my surrounds.  Of the three poems included here, "Secaucus from the Train"  is the only one that's completely setting-inspired. It was written when I was making a return visit to my childhood home of New Jersey.  Normally, when I'm in New Jersey, I drive everywhere, but on this particular visit, I didn't have a car, so for the first time in my life, I was using NJ Transit. This gave me time to observe my home state in a fresh way, noticing details I hadn't examined so intently before. I had driven through the swamps of Secaucus and the Meadowlands hundreds of times, but while gazing out the train window I found myself wondering what those marshlands must have looked like before they became the site of factories, highways, and industrial pollution. Having lived in Hawaii surrounded by natural beauty for the past sixteen years, I was aghast to see homes plunked down right in the middle of this incredible ugliness, bearing witness to the destruction of a formerly complex and diverse natural habitat. And I wondered what it would be like to grow up there, surrounded by garbage, fumes and noise, rather than in the forested upper middle class suburb fifteen minutes down the road where I had been raised. Equally awful was watching the birds go about their normal behavior, oblivious to the horror that surrounded them.

 

Well, for starters, I never title anything until it's otherwise done. The title always comes last. This is true of everything I write: fiction, poetry and nonfiction alike. In fact, I teach high school and middle school English and creative writing, and I tell my students to wait until even a paper is done before titling it. For a long time, "Bird Women" was called, simply, "Birds" as a working title, until the real title suggested itself to me. "Birds" definitely would not have offered the resonance you experienced with "Bird Women." I think the most effective titles take the poem and the reader to a new place, context or level of meaning that they can only understand after having read the complete poem. When I read poetry, I have a tendency to forget the title as soon as I start reading the poem, so that, when I finish, I need to go back and remind myself of the title. Oddly, this approach seems to work for me, because, inevitably, there's an "a-ha" moment that comes with the moment of remembering the title. A great example of this, for me, is one of my favorite poems, Adrienne Rich's "Power." Another of my favorite poets, Gabriel Spera, achieves that title-poem resonance in his collection The Standing Wave with poems like "Idle Hands" and "Without a Sequel."  And of course, there's Seamus Heaney's "Death of a Naturalist," which might be the best example of this type of resonance I know. My advice is to hold off until the end and then let the poem suggest its title to you, rather than trying to impose titles on your work or, even worse, plunking something on there as if it has no significance, just because you need a title. Read the work of poets you like and notice how they use titles. And always, always title your work.

 

 

I've actually been taking a break from poetry for a little while and focusing on a novel that so far has existed most fully in my head. I began to conceive of it two years ago, and it won't let go of me.  On paper, it looks like a bunch of short vigniettes, pieces of chapters written in no particular order, although I know where they go in the overall narrative. I just returned from a writing retreat where I was developing some of these scenes and bouncing ideas and questions off some women writer-friends. I came back with a lot of food for thought, and since I'm on summer break right now, I have time to sit down and meet my novel face to face, as it were.

 

 

It's interesting that you read the spacing as a kind of music. I experience those places more as a breathless soaring across geographic space. The two strongest sounds I hear in that poem are the wind and the heartbeat of the narrator. But I do feel strongly about the sonic quality of words in poetry. This is why I tell my students that the best tool to help them develop as writers is vocabulary. The more words you have at your disposal, the more options you have, not only connotatively, but also sonically. I am famous in my school for making my English classes every year chant aloud as a class, "Poetry is meant to be read aloud!" When I grade poems, there is a criterion that reads, "Poem cries out to be read aloud." Of course, if a poem sounds like a great piece of music, but it makes no sense whatsoever or is bogged down in unclear language, well, I'd say that's more than a little unbalanced and problematic. This is a common error I find in the work of young, inexperienced writers who are developing their ear for language; they sometimes get so wrapped up in creating beautiful-sounding writing that they forget it has to mean something too. I try to encourage the development of the music in the poem while also asking them to consider what they are trying to convey.

 

 

I love music, and singing and dancing are two of my life's great passions, but I cannot write to it. It's too distracting, and I don't want the writing to be influenced by what I'm hearing, which is someone else's idea. I tend to write in complete silence if I'm at home or to write outdoors in the natural landscape to the sounds of the wind through the trees and the ebb and flow of the ocean tide, which--along with the sound of a gently rushing stream-- are my favorite sounds. Most of my poems have been started in a natural location: often I write seated on an enormous dead tree at my favorite beach, where the bark is bleached white and smooth and it's comfortable to stretch out. When I hike with my family down into a remote valley, I always bring my journal, and I nearly always start a poem there. I wrote "Bird Women" while on a retreat, camping at the family estate of one of my students on the south part of the island. Her grandmother and great grandmother are bird lovers and keepers. The birds were my soundtrack; you might even say they sang out the poem to me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The birds gather

at several feeders

hanging from an enormous

monkeypod tree.

Green mesh trays like mini satellite dishes

swing wildly beneath plastic houses

brimming with seed. On each, maybe two

dozen small birds jockey for position,

hopping from catch-tray to feeder and back again:

finches, cardinals, sparrows.

On the ground below, grey Hawaiian doves

peck at fallen seeds, purring.

 

The chattering of some

seventy-odd birds provides the

background music—

a band of Ornette Colemans—

for the proprietress’s lunch, eaten

in her treetop screened porch.

She feeds cats too,

and when I ask if they hunt

the birds she so lovingly sustains,

she offers a nonchalant “yes,”

noting that the birds

don’t seem to mind;

they go on eating

as one of their brethren

is carried off by a mother cat

to feed a kitten in need of

fresh meat.

 

 

 

 

 

Inside the porch, an Amazon parrot named Liko

perches outside the opening

to her cage. She carps incessantly,

not the high-pitched chirp of the finches,

but the shrill creak of a screen door,

slow-opening, gravelly and low, then grating

as it screeches before slamming shut.

Her owner tells me the bird

hates men. Every male exotic on the estate

bears a scar at its neck,

literal, not proverbial,

a wound received in the avian battle

of the sexes.

The woman’s 45 year-old son shows me his

scar: the bird knows a man

when she sees one,

whatever the species—

hates all equally, without

discrimination.

 

 

 

 

 

Outside,

near the main house

on the estate,

exotics call to each other from

cages in rows—

a small avian zoo—

their freedom amputated,

punished for our

shortcomings.

 

 

 

 

 

For a time she

might have flitted

through the trees,

wary of cats.

Once domesticated, she found

freedom

indoors, but two decades

is a long time,

after all. He didn’t expect

a bite to the throat,

nor did she,

didn’t expect

the bird to want

to use its wings

again.

 

 

 

 

 

A container, the kind a semi carries,

rusts in someone’s backyard, partly

obscured by shrubs.

The swamps of New Jersey spread

for miles. Waving cattails

hide the water from which they spring,

but I can see brown pools through the window

of a train heading west to Dover.

 

Below the tracks ducks gather

near floating boards,

partially submerged tires,

an empty drum, household waste—

the flotsam of a society at war with its origins.

 

Factory chimneys provide the skyline

for a sudden expanse of open water,

and a heron reveals itself, then another,

some geese. They gather, dipping heads under,

shaking thick, grey water

over feathers, oblivious to the insidious creep

of the unseen.

 

Around the next bend, the children living

in ramshackle brick and wood row houses

with concrete and garbage

for landscaping

and the thunder of the train

for music

don’t look out their windows.

 

 

 

 

 

Spotting him on the horizon, you sail

in, your petal wings beating

as fast as your heart.

 

It's tricky, swooping

down, reaching out with your left arm to

grab the ailing man or boy or

boy-man.

 

You can do this,

you tell yourself.

You have the listening ear,

the beating heart.

 

As your left arm reaches

under his shoulder, encircles

his ribs and lifts, you feel

your chest beat against his,

you think you feel his

beating back.

 

His hair brushes against

your forehead, you feel

his cheek closetoyours

 

feel his e x h a l e

warm near your ear.

 

Your right hand scoops up

the detritus of his life:

an old pipe filled

with the resin of his mother's

errors; a lighter that might have shown

the way through the darkness, if only

he hadn't wasted its fuel on grass;

a whiskey bottle filled

with his sister's tears, his own.

 

You spread your perfect, white

petal wings and             soar

up,

up

over the ocean.

 

You try to ignore the strain

in your back, neck, arms,

deny the racing heart,

the gasping breath,

as your wings beat faster

and bruise.

 

You look for a place

to

alight

 

a place where you

are you

and he

is he.

Happy.

 

 

Scanning the ground   for miles

you see no

such place, you know

you can carry him no longer,

your wings mere petals,

 

so you

 

dive

 

skim the water

release him

gently

and watch his

long swim

home.