Published by The Puddin’head Press
Perfect Bound, 83 pages
5.5 x 8.5 inches, 2011
ISBN# 978-0-9819756-1-0
$12.00
Praise for Tunnel Into Morning
A sensually luscious, voluptuous work! Maureen Tolman Flannery is intently aware of life’s beginnings and turnings, their “interlaced calligraphy of error,” and the infinite possibilities born of our thoughts enmeshed in the earnest longings of our flesh. There is pain here as well, and death, but the tunnel into morning is bright within her. In these pages, Whitman has met his match among women.
Jared Smith – Author of Grassroots and The Graves Grow Bigger Between Generations
Over the years, Maureen Tolman Flannery’s poems have created a world of familial relationships, global journeys, memory and prophecy that invariably evoke waves of deja-vu in the unsuspecting reader. For this book, she has collected her best poetry from a multiplicity of international publications, fashioning an arc of spiritual as well as deeply physical moments that stay with the reader long after the book has been put down and the bedside light extinguished. Flannery’s gift for touching the reader with a phrase, an image, or a sound, is one that illuminates the darkest tunnel and always leads to morning.
Donna Pucciani – Author of To Sip Darjeerling at Dawn
About Maureen Flannery
Maureen Tolman Flannery is a granddaughter of Irish Immigrants and homesteading sheep ranchers. She grew up in a small town in Wyoming near the Big Horn Mountains.
Maureen earned her AB and MA degrees from Creighton University where she met her husband Dan. After living in Mexico, they settled in Evanston Illinois where they taught English as a Foreign Language for thirty-five years.
Maureen serves on the board of the Anam Chara elder-care facility in Boulder and has been a passionate supporter of home-birth, Waldorf education and conscious death. She works at the Chicago Waldorf School where her four children were educated and her grandson now attends.
Maureen has had five hundred poems published in more than two hundred journals and anthologies in five countries.
She edited the anthology Knowing Stones: Poems of Exotic Places, (John Gordon Burke Publisher).
Her published poetry books are: Remembered into Life (Newsong Press), Secret of the Rising Up: Poems of Mexico (John Gordon Burke Publisher), A Fine Line (Fractal Edge Press), Conversations for the Road (TMP Irregular), Ancestors in the Landscape: Poems of a Rancher’s Daughter (John Gordon Burke Publisher), Destiny Whispers to the Beloved (John Gordon Burke Publisher), Snow and Roses: Traute Lafrenz among the White Rose Resistance (Fine Line Press).
Mrs. Flannery is the recipient of an Illinois Art Award and numerous awards including The Jo-Anne Hirshfield Memorial Award, several Pushcart Prize nominations, and many first prizes from the National Federation of State Poetry Societies. She is treasurer of Poets’ Club of Chicago.
Contents
Secret Sadness Of Waning Fertility
Moving Way Back
Sleep-work
Here And Now
Hotel Rating
Reading At Shakespeare And Co. Bookstore
Feet
Genuine Time
Neighborhood Fort
An Unsettling Awareness
The Luck Child
Reunited In Nightly Visitations
The Poet’s Wife
Before Sleep
Rendezvous
Body Of My Mother-In-Law
Sainthood
Sore Throat
The man who raised some ruckus and a joyful noise
Finding Passage
Racing The Pain
Trucking Down The Switchbacks
Between The Cracks
Aspect Of Aging
Flood Release
Cleaning His Room
The Fisherman Remembers
Full Pockets
Folk Listener’s Lament
When The Body No Longer Accommodates
Farm Auction, Depression Era
Men Of The Mountain Town
Litany For A Rancher
Pre-Dawn
Catching His Death
Take Me To The Green Valley
I Never Confessed To Dad
Farmer’s Widow Gives Him A Piece Of Her Mind
Small Town Mansions
Go Wise And Gentle
Thoughts Of The Dead
The Letter
Falling
The Hook
Abandoned Ranch Site On Spring Creek
Golden Age Of Country
If,
Hold On Loosely
No Small Matter
The Birdman’s Release
Bridget Buries Her Newborn In The Fairy Field
Humus
Time’s Appeasement
Among The Ruins
Where Time Faltered
Peat Bog
To Find Your Irish Heritage
Coming Into Color
Singer On The Isle Of Stones
Roots
Failings of The Scribe Embellishing An Irish Bible
A Hat of Candles
Juncture
Do You Wonder If The Plagues Are Scheduled
Careening Into Joy
Or…
Cry Havoc
Pieta
Seeking Relief From The Heat
Seventeen Colors Of A Maple
Eurydice And Orpheus
Will She Say The Word?
Vocabulary Downsizing
Seeing A Play About Dylan’s Final Years
Commuter Exchange
Frank Lloyd Wright Buries His Love
The Same Places
Prospero’s Threat
Death By Poetry
Sample Poetry
An Unsettling Awareness
The small boy first noticed something strange
when he found his rabbit sleeping, couldn’t shake him awake.
Then his great-grandpa who held him on his lap in the big chair
that rolled down the hall like his sister’s stroller,
something named Death came for him too.
And there have been others.
Harry Carey, (not Harry Canary, the balloon-bird) but
Harry Carey, the man with big glasses at the baseball game–
what he is now is dead.
Martuther King was a really good man and he died anyway.
What’s going on?
Cousin Lucinda went to hospital
and now Tia Lupe has to blow her nose
every time the boy asks for Lucinda to come over and play.
The house on the corner is dark at night
and the old lady with chin whiskers
doesn’t come out anymore to show him her flowers.
Grown ups give silly answers about circles and time and God
and Earth Mother taking things back to make flowers.
He knows they talk to each other about it,
but when he stops playing in the sandbox to listen closer,
they say the rest in ABCs.
Isn’t God’s place getting full up by now
like the inn at Bethlehem?
It’s hard to figure out how it works.
Stud Sterko is dead, but he wasn’t for a long, long time.
And Stud Squirkel, the squirrel, isn’t dead,
just living in a different tree.
Lots of alive things have gone still like his bunny.
A raccoon by the road with red on its legs
did not slurk away.
A bird in the dirt had ants crawling around its eyes.
He commands his mom and dad
to list everyone they know who died.
Yes everyone, including horses and prairie dogs
that don’t pop up out of their holes anymore.
This monster-thing Death stops and disappears people.
You don’t even know when someone won’t be there anymore
or if the pony that lets you ride him
will go frozen stiff, like the cat he saw in the bushes.
And now there’s this thing about Jesus—
not the one the soldiers were mean to in the Friday play,
but Jesus, the real one. He died too.
Not the pretend Jesus who’s not real and not really dead.
The real one died, for real, but didn’t stay dead.
So the boy is waiting for when his great grandpa comes back alive–
and his bunny and maybe even the King Doctor that was dreaming.
The Poet’s Wife
We’d be inclined to attribute to her an enviable life—
sharing her day-to-day with a master of the aptly expressed.
I imagine she could taste immortality in the wedding cake
as she, dressed in white lace like an Irish casement,
said her vows and thought how future generations
would read of her exotic beauty and her pensive depth.
But I’m halfway through his fourth book
and not one poem about her,
not so much as a stanza of extended spousal metaphor.
His themes suggest he lives alone—except for off-handed
deference to the one who prepared the gourmet dinner
or gave the distinctive gift.
Seldom as much attention paid to her as to the salt shaker
or the asparagus spear. Not even an ode
to the blush of her cheeks or a treatise on the way
she brushes long dark hair before a vanity mirror.
Never accorded center stage with the dog
or the wildflowers beside the path to the mailbox,
she seems at best an addendum, certainly referred to less
than light through the eastern window
or the ceiling above his bed.
I keep waiting for her to burst onto a page in a jealous rage,
spewing accusations at the travel agent or the girl in the café.
She’ll fling a crystal goblet of chardonnay at the noteworthy
wallpaper, and kick the idealized dog in his expressive tail-end.
Surely, she shrieks as frown lines indent, I am on occasion
more interesting than the place mats. Can you think
of nothing to say about the way I caress your face?
Try taking that clever dog to bed with you tonight.
and she walks off in a huff
into the white margin of a poem about a birdcage key.
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