For Mother's Day, the poem that leads the Sparrow

This is the poem that — on editor (and friend) Paul Vermeersch's suggestion — opens my new book, A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent. As I've said, I wanted this book to be very different from any other poetry book I've published.

My parents, Syd and Shirley, bought a place in Pompano Beach, Florida, in, I think, the mid-1980s. They spent four or five months a year there. I visited them in Pompano a few times before my mother's death in 1995, and a couple more times before my father sold the place not long before his own death in 2001. I usually stayed for a few weeks. It was a surreal experience being in that land of snowbird communities, and it was sometimes trying for both my parents and I to spend so much time in close quarters, but those times were also really beautiful. I miss them.

It was on the balcony mentioned in the poem below that I wrote my much earlier poem "Little Black Train," which was a pivotal piece for me. I also wrote a word-replacement version of Tom Clark's "Sonnet" ("The orgasm completely/Takes the woman out of/Herself…") and another of Mark Strand's "Keeping Things Whole" (which I just heard quoted in the final episode of the first season of Blunt Talk). I did versions of a whole bunch of American poets' poems, and several of them wound up in a long piece of mine called "Yankee Doodle," which maybe appeared in my first full-length collection, The Inspiration Cha-Cha. The swimming pool by their condo was the one that inspired my short story "The Sun Tan," from Buying Cigarettes for the Dog.

Anyway, here's the first poem in my new book. I struggled with this one for many years, and then rewrote it about half a dozen times more after Sparrow was accepted for publication.

POMPANO

And my mother is on the balcony

and my father is making cheese sandwiches

and my mother is writing a letter

that my father will discover

two months later in their bedroom

in Toronto, the morning

we’re to bury her

she writes that

she is on the balcony

and he is making cheese sandwiches

and she says she feels treasured

and if ever there are grandkids

tell them she’d’ve loved them

and in five years my brother

dies in my sobbing father’s arms

and my father one year after

and I cannot find the letter

my mother wrote in Pompano

but I remember the word treasured

it’s how she felt, she said

and the palm trees sway in the hot breeze

and butterflies called daggerwings drift past

and sand skinks swim through millions of grains of sand

and I — I am a pompano

I am this forked-tailed fish

I am this fish and I search

for that letter in my mother’s hand

beyond the Atlantic coast

Over and out.