Another side of my work that complements my scholarly research and clinical practice is my poetry, which sometimes lets me tap a deep reservoir of responsiveness to the human and natural worlds in which we are embedded.  I tend to write in a somewhat spare contemporary free verse, liberated from conventions of rhyme and meter, but with attention to rhythm, alliteration, prosody and assonance... in a word how a poem sounds as well as how it reads silently.  My poems draw on both a vocabulary of objective, situated description of the concrete particulars of experience and one of metaphoric allusion to subjective realities beyond the merely physical.  Not surprisingly, a recurrent though not dominant theme running through much of my verse is accommodation to loss in its many forms, occasionally phrased in a way that offers perspective or consolation, but more often depicted in the stark and edgy way that grief enters and disrupts human life and attachments.  Rarely, then, are these greeting card sentiments.

Here I offer a small sample of poems that convey the range of my work, some of which have been published in various literary reviews or professional journals, as well as in my first collection of poetry entitled Rainbow in the Stone.  Each of the poems below is accompanied by an image by an artist friend who has contributed to a second compilation of my work, The Art of Longing, which is now in print.  More information on both volumes, including instructions or links for ordering, appear following the representative poems.

Good words to you!

.  Climbing Down

The blaze of morning

ignites the cliffs,

evaporates the moon,

hanging ghostly as the coyote’s howl.

It is time to begin the walk,

to be swallowed deep in the throat of rock,

time to climb down,

beneath history,

through the saline memory

of ancient seas

washing the earth

like a scouring hand.

Now the sea rises hot within us,

spills out,

seeks sand, sky,

the root of Utah juniper,

the cone of piñon pine.

It falls away

like a tear of lament.

It bleeds back

into the raised ribs of earth,

glowing yellow as bleached bones.

An old ache throbs still

beneath the pulse of words.

It pulls us

toward the vacancy of arches

fixing us with their empty stares.

The sun leans into us,

and we lean into the rocks.

Each footstep carries us

deeper into earth,

deeper into sky.

Like the desert,

we ripen toward subsistence.

Survivors

He has stopped trying

to grasp her remoteness

that he mistakes for calm,

this cooling that accompanies

the wintering of her grief.

Since their daughter’s explosive

departure, its echo

like a slammed door,

she has pulled in, and in,

away from the pain,

away from him.

What he cannot know is how

she slips inside the sleeve

of her music, the lyrics

of angels

   touch

return,

draws down into the bubble

of her hope.

Alone in her car,

the music builds a room

around her, around the room

a house through which

she strolls.

It is in the nursery

that she feels the peace,

rocks her child, rocks herself,

restores the bond.

Too soon, the car turns itself

into her drive, slides

into the vault of garage.

Her hand finds the latch,

pulls her out.  She takes the steps

like a condemned man.

The forced hello fades,

yields to the distance.

She glances up at him,

sees the eyes,

the terrible mirrors,

and turns again to stone.

Spirit

She was seven months in you

wrapped snug in your house of flesh

when she came to rest,

turned her face to the dark wall.

Beyond your high hard hope

you knew in your heart that she was gone,

this sliding shift of gravity

in your belly, in your bed.

You named her Spirit

because this is how she came to you—

there and not there,

a doll baby with eyes

painted shut.  Instinctively,

your hands reach out,

grasp at air,

try to pull the light toward you,

into you, disperse the darkness.

A silent cipher, no one

can know what you have lost.

Now she stares at you

with the indifference of the angels

through the paper eyes, smiles

of baby pictures in your obstetrician’s office,

the glazed gaze of newborns nursing

in restaurants at their mothers’ breasts.

One after another, she tries on lives,

in the frames, in the arms of strangers.

She leaves each like a pair

of discarded shoes.

And so you seek her

in the misty maze to which she has retreated,

the shadow flash of dreams,

the sudden sightings of a body,

small and dark as a polished stone,

and as cold.

Left still on the couch,

found wrapped in a box,

she practices dying until it is perfected,

until you find a new way

of holding on.

The Meeting

1.  The Voice

There is a voice

that is ours

and not ours.

It rises up

from the deep well of being,

lets its shape be seen

indistinctly, like a manta

gliding closer, closer,

still silent, shimmering,

as seen from the surface.

Your tremors will confirm

that it is there.

2.  The Coming

Your thrashing

will not bring it.

It answers the call

of quiet, the still heart,

resting between beats.

If you close your eyes

you will sense its coming.

Already it stands

on the threshold,

arrived unbidden

for the room made ready.

If you lift your gaze

to its face and bid it

enter, it will step in,

follow you

through all the rooms

of your house.

It is the only guest

who will fill the space

and make it larger.

It is the grandparent

you have always needed.

3.  The Dialogue

You ask it why

it has come to you.

It answers, It is you

who have come to me.

I am the one who does not move,

who is always waiting.

You ask it what it waits for.

It says, I wait for an opening,

a pause in your speech

with others.  My whisper

is low, but deep.  It washes

though you, cleansing.

You ask what it washes.

It answers, I wash away

the misspent hours,

the extraneous attachments,

the needless pain.

Without them,

you will find a life of purpose.

Already you are shining.

4.  The Gift

When it goes

it will leave you something

in a small box.  You will find it

in the evening, open it

with trembling hands.

Touching it,

your breath will catch,

your eyes will flood with tears.

It is what you have always sought,

a globe of light,

pulsing, shifting form.

It is not yet a soul.

Travelers

You know the lucky thing about my hip replacement?

she asked, not waiting for the answer.

It made me think about advance directives,

my living will, how I’d like to die.

Yeah, he said, her colleague

who chatted amiably with death

each day, like two old men

playing checkers in the park.

I know what you mean.

This is how it is

with the nurses, doctors, therapists

who walk down the halls of dying

as through the home of a relative,

pausing to leaf through the Geographic,

or straighten a family photograph on the wall.

They have earned their ease

the hard way,

learned to reach through the bramble

to find the fruit, add weight

to the rusty pail.

They have not so much grown inured

to pain as they have learned to savor it,

taste the sweetness in the grapefruit’s bite,

feel the glow of a day’s hard toil.

In the end, we need them

as we need seasoned travelers

met in an unfamiliar land.

They greet us on the steep trail,

in the twisting streets, point the way

to a good taverna, trace the path home.

Most of all, they help us

parse the dark syllables in our hearts,

bare them,

and seek cleansing

in the gathering storm.

Rainbow in the Stone

Selected Poems by Robert A. Neimeyer

Publisher:  Mercury

In this collection of 57 poems, Neimeyer offers moving mediations on loss and impermanence, drawing on his own experiences of life and transition, as well as his deep engagement as a psychotherapist in the lives of others.  Poems are organized into four sections, entitled Lessons of Loss, focused on grief in its searing, gently insistent and transcendent aspects, I Sing to the Earth, a series of odes and observations of the physical world that we inhabit and that inhabits us, Coming Through, a celebration of growth and connection, and Ars Poetica, a closing set of reflections on the writing of poetry itself.

What critics are saying about Rainbow in the Stone:

"We need the lift of words/like birds need the air.”  In Rainbow in the Stone, Neimeyer yet again finds the language to understand, express and console—this time in concise poetry.  His brilliance in articulating what we know in our hearts about life and death, love and loss, makes this seemingly compact volume a vast, indispensable companion.

    —Sandra Bertman, editor, Grief and the Healing Arts

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Neimeyer’s elegant, probing lines are subtle hypnotic devices that render time irrelevant, evoking streams of imagery and memories to savor in slow motion…. Like a net cast from the outer banks of human consciousness, these beautifully rendered poems draw up something primal in our relation to nature and ourselves, opening its existential mysteries to a wiser and more compassionate recognition.

    —Susan Roos, author of Chronic Sorrow:  A Living Loss

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Opening Rainbow in the Stone is like stepping into a sea of fresh images that capture the sense of place and subject with clairvoyance. Neimeyer’s keen observation invites us to experience the poignancy of loss, to celebrate the gift of our earth, to proclaim our human potential and connectedness, and to meditate on the power and magic of the written word.  This resonant set of poems brings to mind a verse of ee cummings:  "now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are open.”  Neimeyer's own ear is finely tuned to the human experience, and reading the poems in this collection will allow you to know yourself more fully.

    —Claire Newman McGoff, poet and author of Painted Ladies

The Art of Longing

Selected Poems by Robert A. Neimeyer

and art by Richard Knowles

with additional artistic contributions by Alfonso Garcia, Lisa Jennings, Sigrun Menzel and Barbara Thompson

Publisher:  BookSurge

This collection of 52 poems, paintings, collages and photographs explores the convergence of words and images, produced independently by a network of artistic collaborators who then paired their linguistic and visual productions to amplify the resonance of each.  As suggested by the title poem, The Art of Longing, and the cover painting, On the Threshold, by Lisa Jennings, the poetry and artwork often evokes loss, grief and yearning, while hinting at the solace that can be provided by immersion in nature, by creativity, and by companionship and continued connection to those we love.  

What critics are saying about The Art of Longing:

With ancient seas that scour the land and grief that scours the heart, poet Robert Neimeyer’s starkly beautiful The Art of Longing takes us deep into the earth, deep into the heart of millennia of humans burying their dead, studying the stars, attempting to understand themselves and the universe....

Like Neimeyer’s poems, all the artists’ images are vivid and layered with meaning, [from]  Knowles’ thickly pasted ochres and umbers, his asymmetrical, unpredictable gestures, and streaks of red near the center of several of his paintings, [to] Lisa Jennings [canvases] that scrape and scumble layers of acrylic and handmade papers into surfaces that look as textured and ancient as the limestone cliffs, the stone megaliths and Neolithic tombs she paints....

In poem after poem and image after image, Neimeyer’s haunting explorations of life’s great pleasures and pains asks the reader a question:  Will you, like the narrators in The Art of Longing, “nurse the hurt, refuse the fullness/of this world,” or will you climb into the currach and ride the waves?

   —Art critic Carol Knowles, from the  Foreword