Beyond the Tree of Dreams

One October night in my mid-twenties, I sat down on the stoop outside my apartment in Maine to watch a lunar eclipse. When the last bit of bright light vanished, I experienced an extraordinary sensation, as though Earth was a giant living being moving beneath me. Also in my twenties, my mother had a severe stroke that impacted her speech and mobility and our lives were changed forever. At thirty-four, I held my best friend and partner of four and a half years in my arms, as his body took its last breaths in this world. Poetry is the result of the challenging process of finding words to adequately convey profound experiences such as these. It is a linguistic celebration of the spectrum of emotions and feelings available to us in this miraculous life. Here is the culmination of over fifteen years of navigating the storms of life, distilled into 45 poems from heartbreak and grief to love and laughter.