John Fitzgerald at Moonday Poetry 2011

John FitzGerald is a poet, writer, editor and attorney in Los Angeles. A dual citizen of the United States and Ireland, he attended UCLA and the University of West Los Angeles School of Law, where he was editor of the Law Review. His first book, Spring Water, was a Turning Point Books prize selection in 2005. Telling Time by the Shadows, a book of poems of love and longing, was released in April 2008 by Turning Point Books.

His newest collection of poetry, The Mind, was published by Salmon Poetry in 2011. The book cover is a portrait of John by renowned artist Don Bachardy. FitzGerald has contributed to the anthology Poetry: Reading it, Writing it, Publishing it (Salmon Poetry) and to Dogs Singing: A Tribute Anthology (Salmon Poetry) as well as to many literary magazines. He has worked as the Associate Book Editor for Cider Press Review and has been featured poetry reader at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, the West Hollywood Book Fair, on national radio, and at many literary venues throughout the country. He has lived in England and Italy and now lives with his wife, poet and actress Hélène Cardona, in Santa Monica, California.

Three Poems out of Eighty-nine from The Mind:

Twenty

The mind is door after door after door,
Time is keeper of the keys.
Time needs it to be known that it is no mere illusion.

It unravels moments, revealing the present in little shivers.
The only alternative is everything at once.
Incomprehensible. I’ll not describe its passing.

In every explosion there has to be order.
But what seems to be growing is actually pulling itself apart,
or more precisely, is the pulling apart itself.

Twenty-two

The fear of time is cutting loose.
Letting go of the mind seems worse than losing it
to a life that exists between deadlines.

When I was one, a year took my whole life to live.
At ten it took a tenth, so time was moving faster.
For now it’s about a forty-first, which is to say, a blur.

Downtown, they sit on the steps and wait for the sun to pass.
They tell time by their shadows.
Like a newborn left unanswered, time will cry itself to death.

Twenty-four

Let me tell you about before
when I was in the center,
and it never occurred to me to be anywhere else.

Like the maps in a grammar school lesson,
the center depends upon who tells the story.
A map of the Pacific is a fast expanse of ocean,

the bits of land around the sides are merely names for now,
imperceptibly drifting, floaters across an eyeball,
as if to get away with something.

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