Winter’s End in Winterland is the title of the Portfolio that I submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for obtaining my Master in Philosophy degree in Creative Writing from the Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing at Trinity College Dublin. The Preface to this Portfolio describes the events that gave birth to the poetry that filled it. I reproduce that Preface here:

Preface

Winter’s End in Winterland is a title that came to me on a sunny morning in late Autumn, 2022, as I stood in the small garden at our cottage in Glasnevin, not three hundred yards from Glasnevin Cemetery, just there across Violet Hill Park and the Tolka River. Winter’s End is a song by uilleann piper, Liam O’Flynn, too beautiful to be endured. Winterland is Hibernia, is Ireland. At that time, my bride, Stacie, was with me in Dublin and I was a student at the Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing at Trinity College, Dublin. Stacie was dying of a metastatic brain cancer. All that was most precious in my life was being stolen from me. My life then was devoted to doing all I could do, the best I could do with fumbling unschooled hands, making it up as I went along, to care for Stacie before (and after) she was admitted to the Mater Misericordiae Hospital in Phibsborough, and then to St. Francis Hospice, Blanchardstown, where she died in my arms on March 10, 2023, at 9:15 am. She left me at Winter’s end in Winterland.

It had snowed the night before her death. The morning was clear and bright and the sun’s reflection off the snow was cruelly dazzling. The brightness outside made a mockery of and was an insult to the dark pall of gloom that had settled upon me that day with even greater weight than the dark pall of gloom that had settled upon me during all the months leading up to that day.

“Snow was general all over Ireland,” Joyce wrote in The Dead. I recalled those words the morning she died. From the first time I read The Dead, nearly fifty years ago, to the day Stacie left me, I had made an association between falling snow and death. And so it was that day: “the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” The descent of her last end.

Despite the brilliance of that day, the light in my life and heart was extinguished. It is extinguished still and I expect it will remain so for the rest of my days. Death is a commonplace, it is unremarkable, inevitable, and quite mundane for its inevitability, until it comes crashing close to home and heart.

I am a poet. Poetry provides the lens through which I view the overwhelming incomprehensibility of the mysteries I encounter during my tenure on earth. The mysteries cannot be understood, so effort spent trying to do so by dissecting, describing, and explaining all of the baffling experiences of a lifetime is a waste of time. This effort results in approximations, unsatisfactory for their inadequacy, and gets one no nearer the “answers” to the questions that the inquisitor is seeking. The mystery is too big. Poetry is the alembic that distills experience to its quintessence and the elixir captured is a draught of dreams.

My bride’s name was and is Stacie Pauline Schimke. She was a gifted stunning beauty. She was and is the Love and Light of my life. She was the greatest gift ever given to me. I had done nothing to merit the gift of her in my life. I was just plain lucky, the luckiest man in the world.

Her death and absence from my life are as incomprehensible to me as were her life and presence in it. The question I confront each day is whether I will survive my survival of her. In the interval of time since she left me and for the months and years of her decline before her fall, I have been compelled to write poetry about her, about the happiness and sadness we had, and about the impossible cataclysm of her death.

These twenty poems are part of a larger collection that are my monument to her, with which I have tried, to the best of my ability, to honor the wonder of her, and the joys, sorrows, and love we shared. I crafted them perplexed, overmatched, and dumbfounded by the mysteries about which I wrote.

This small body of work is in celebration of and mourning for the most miraculous, mysterious, fascinating, and marvelous woman I have ever known. Her gifts were beyond measure. Her gifts to me were also beyond measure. My Stacie taught me how to live just as she taught me how to die. Would that I were able to do either as well as she. All of the shortcomings of these poems are my fault. What little merit there may be in one or another of them is the work of my Stacie in my life. Even now. These poems are for my Stacie - my Love, my Life, and my Heart - whom I love more than life itself.

The titles of the twenty poems that constitute the Portfolio are in the Table of Contents and are listed here. Several of them have been published.

Contents

Preface

Broken Deer in the Ditch
Elements
Hospice Blessing
Hospice Viewing Room
In the Beginning Was the Word
Laying Your Ghost
Let Us Go, Stacie, Go
Life Lost Its Grace
Losing My October
Lost Bells of Stacie’s Laughter
My Winter Mornings
Sits a Watchman
Sundered Heart
Tea She Gave Me
Three Night Wane
Walking with My Broken Beauty
Went the Flame Once in My Heart
What Stone
Wine of a Summer Twilight
Relics