The 5150 Poems

From Sandra McPherson's Introduction: 
 
One doctor thought the slide commenced with the death of my good father, Walt McPherson.  How can one be sure?  The able habits of writing went away; even the short “documents” that occasioned distant pages in a suede-bound notebook, a gift from artist Katherine Ace, nearly evaporated.  My home’s physical possessions abandoned me—they had been a library of researchable answers.  Prescriptions replaced each other: a decent doctor replaced by an indifferent one. At our first meeting I set eleven books on her desk as introduction.  “You wrote those,” she said contemptuously.  It hurt from there on down.  One afternoon, “We have a bed,” the stranger on the phone said.  I was in it, without choice, by evening.
 
When I was in hospital I was given a lined blank book and a stubby pencil for a golf course.  I wrote down nothing but the schedule to stand in lines required for pills and blood pressure.  I had just lost a museum’s worth of art, and decades of loved books.  I didn’t exist anymore—I was no one who could describe her life—what life?  Write down phone numbers.  Not very colorful. Before the hospital I’d only been able to jot down a few words—not poems really, not explorations.
 
This is my only book that came out as a whole “story.” I’m hoping it has value for readers whose life is in one similar stage or another of it.  It surprised my doctors so I hope it will serve as a case study.  It isn’t Plath, Sexton, or Lowell.  Its voice or style is not what I’d call confessional.  Those poets are who they were, and this volume is a self, lost until found.  A soul separated but succeeding in a sort of “splashdown” back into its home sea on earth, a mind and body known by my name.
 
Shortly before I was released a Sutter psychiatrist said I was the only patient ever to get 100% on some lengthy questionnaire.  I don’t remember what they asked me, but I presume the answers—“answers plus-size”—are represented somewhere in the varieties of poetics in this text or revelation, this womanly schoolbook.
 
From The 5150 Poems:
 
Five Leaves Left
I
 
Clear sky over loose birches
head pillowed
in the middle
of Bach
a severe
 
thunderstorm
warning
concerto #6
get out of the water
if you hear thunder
 
lightning can strike
fifteen miles away
Placer County
El Dorado
Murray Perahia
 
Academy of St. Martin
in the Fields
get out of the lake
and go inside
a car or cabin
 
where there’s 
a radio
for Bach to continue
without warning
full-tilt
 
O I like being
struck by
baroque 
din
I like being.
 
II
 
My roommate,
Sutter Psych,
whose complete sentence
in answer to why
was I attempted,
 
is the brightest light
assigned to me,
not the one who cursed
fondled purrers and petted yippers,
the one who propped the wide door open
 
all night to the screams,
nor the one who slept
off every day
through spikes
of weary, violent hair.
 
I would give them names—
daughters—
but I was unable to write
by hand or memory:
that’s why I was in.
 
This attempting roommate—
the one attempting most
to live.  
Cut unnecessary words,
we thought together, not our wrist.
 
III
 
Joanne!  Washing your hair
twice daily,
brushing out its jet facets,
luscious as a suicide coke
(with strains of chocolate, cherry syrup,
 
and Yoshitoshi’s bijin-ga:
“I want to offer you sake,” “I want to be served”),
beverage that sustained us 
girls in summer.
You were
 
the ward’s best inpatient at volleyball,
athletic in embrace 
of your lover
nightly visiting. How you clasped,
released, contorted, em-
 
broidered yourselves upon each 
other’s length.  Less like
a medieval love knot
than two lotuses’ soaked roots,
waterlilies, so that, impassioned,
 
you don’t hear staff call
Code Lavender.
Stop it.  Everyone’s too interested!
Such beauty, roomie,
on that ugly orange vinyl couch.
 
IV
 
Two years, one room       
away from where 
they found me “oversleeping” on the shower floor.
Through drought
there’s clement music
 
they’re radioing, 
recovered
from badly deteriorated parts.
A motet?  Chorus, but not, as they’d ask us daily, “hearing voices.”
And some hopped up D. Scarlatti,
 
pair of sonatas; reconstructed
Handel Hornpipe;
an Agnus Dei.
As I remember lady on lady,
Brumel Earthquake Missa,
 
one’s own mass
an equally singular
justification to go on breathing,
something in oneself
become
 
a convent choir of a hundred
thirteenth century nuns 
swinging, jazzed.
While my mind was out of the room
the leafy wands
 
kept swinging,
all along them little lives 
—moths, finches—
more than clinging,
singing No, ECT.  Yes, Birches.
 
V
 
Bach again, and triple
violin concerto,
and how can this occur all over?
Urgent machine voice,
an interception
 
because the fire-scorched earth
no longer holds,
Amador, Calaveras, San Joaquin, Stanislaus,
doppler radar flash flooding,
Grizzly Flat, Volcano,
 
move away from recently burned areas, 
Oktoberfest radio mudslide
warning in the middle of 
these strange duets of J. S. and the State
awaken me, 
 
electrical, shocking.  As
when we told each other
last names—
are you Professor?
Joanne said.
 
My friends love you!
Then I knew
I was crazy.
From our hard twin beds,
her Norco plus my Norco
 
only cancelled any instinct
we might have had to die; better to 
live and leave “checked out”
by getting out
of Sutter Psych.
 
Keep up the interruption,
delivery by lightning:
. . . debris flow,
move to higher ground now,
act quickly to protect your life.