Wildfires
Ash drifts like pollen. A pall sieves the sun. The campfire conundrum
of sage and plastic. Like the fallout from the Towers that may have sown
the seeds of our tumors. There’s talk of containment onscreen, maps
resembling CT, PET, MRI. The waiting room’s empty so the verdict is
swift: “NED.” No evidence of disease. The yet is implied, but not until
some other outcome takes me hopefully while I am submerged in sleep
and my daughter is old enough to write poetry for me. But for tonight
we pack our bags and flee . . . In the desert morning abstractly she paints
while I sketch these words for her. I drink only water. I used to sleep
but now I wake at dawn. Without remorse. The bronze statue absorbs
radiation. The rake is in the sand; the plunk and crinkle of phantasmal
pétanque in the shade of the lemon trees while my girl sips lemonade
and we debate the pros and cons of presidents and queens versus giving
each other what is needed. At home the hills are rolling molten while
fountains babble here. I follow my darling’s darting footfalls through
the flowering branches of a maze. I used to worry but now I laugh until
it’s gone.
–first published in Poetry London
Napping after Cancer
feels dangerous, and almost nothing like traveling to Saint-Rémy when
my wife was expecting and beginning to show, her morning sickness
lifting, to pass through Roman arches and chrome-yellow wheat fields
beneath desiccated cypresses lining trails pocked with irises and blue
mulberries where van Gogh painted through barred windows (omitting
said bars), and eschewing the guided tour we indulged ourselves instead
in the market square gorging on cheeses so slender the two of us even
her despite her bulge; then zigzagging downhill into the grand allées
between colonnades of sighing plane trees stretching in the straightaway
across for the intimation murmuring from her body to mine: our child
tumble-turning inside. How could we know what was waiting for us
just around the bend? In the afternoon we pulled over to rest our eyes
drowsy from the drive in a gravelly rest stop, shoulder to shoulder like
effigies with our seats reclined and the windows wide, dandelions
unfurling in a breeze.
-first published in Birmingham Poetry Review and Literary Hub
Like Abraham and Mary Todd
He’s not a medical doctor, but his shingle hangs along the street where
they performed your surgery; where in a glass atrium, next to nurses
on their lunch break eating salad out of plastic clamshells, I wept when
I learned your cancer was contained. Through the winter I succored you
before we swapped roles. Now we sit cheek to cheek in a sinking couch
with arms and legs crossed in a sunset that comes boring through blinds,
listening to a stork-like old man peddle his wares. His conjugal cure.
Behind double-layered doors. “How dramatic,” he remarks upon
hearing our tale: “Like Abraham and Mary Todd.” How many couples
has he compared to the Great Emancipator and his grief-addled spouse?
And why? Neither of us is heroic, neither insane. I know that I am prone
to self-pity; she has her temper. Probably he says it to say something
because I can tell already we’ve fatigued him. His certificates are sealed
with a symbol like a cross and a trident combined. While he drones on
I’m itching to retrieve a ballpoint pen from the coffee table to transcribe
our predicament: watercolor abstractions of dancers in selected stages
of the tango; an antiquated laptop; shelves of dusty peer-reviewed
journals; a white-noise machine that’s been left unplugged. This is how
we avoid asking: Can you love me still? Can I love you still? Can you forgive
my treatment; can I forgive yours? Can we forgive our afflictions? Can rage revive
love? We are confounded. The error is grave. In the corridor as we leave
I see what I missed on our way in: The building is old, run-down, almost
abandoned.
-first published in Laurel Review
Sunday
O may it be Sunday always and everywhere in California. Blemishless
mothers with breathless cheekbones wavering in line for coffee. My girl
in the back seat, her mother beside me. Unseen whistling for the tabby
as coyotes lope through alleys; we park downslope. Bowers garlanded
in blush. I press my daughter’s body to my body and carry her through
the chlorine cavity. Beneath polluted arteries. The enlarging bright
aperture of sand. Then waves that pain my feet: my senseless skin
revivifying in the effluvial flop and stream. I am becoming less and more
myself. Renascent. The mountain snows dribble from a drainage pipe
like the seminal Jordan. Seagulls alight as if to say, Look where you are
standing. For this you have survived. Our daughter laughs as she pummels
us both. O may it be always and everywhere now.
-first published in Birmingham Poetry Review
These poems can be found in Survivor’s Notebook (Acre Books, 2023) as well as the new pamphlet Flying on Easter and Other Poems (Poetry London Editions, 2024).
Dan O’Brien is a playwright, poet, memoirist, essayist, and librettist. In 2023 he published three books: a memoir entltled From Scarsdale: A Childhood (Dalkey Archive Press); a collection of plays entitled True Story: A Trilogy (Dalkey Archive Press); and a collection of prose poems and photographs entitled Survivor’s Notebook (Acre Books). In 2024 his play Newtown premiered at Geva Theatre, directed by Elizabeth Williamson. Newtown received the 2024 Blanche and Irving Laurie Foundation Theatre Visions Fund Award. Also in 2024, his pamphlet Flying on Easter and Other Poems was published by Poetry London. More on Dan can be found here: www.danobrien.org.