Too Far from Home

Fire and Ice

2009-02-10T00:25:00.005-05:00

a poem

possess me quickly
like high spiced food

a flood
cold clear water
fire sweeping through
backdraft
like sex

like sudden illness
down with a fever
felled like a tree
white pine
ax murderer

like death
a stroke
massive heart attack

concentrate
stick and rub
under pressure
diamond

eap

time is a wolf

2009-02-09T23:51:00.002-05:00

time is a wolf in a cave

a few beats away
from my heart’s twelve
where you will be blamed
because I was not found

your head
on my heart
stops
like a wolf
in its cave

you swore it was the last time
and so did I
we both swore
the last

time I said it’s forever
and you said it was
but we both knew
it was a wolf
in a cave

I want to know
will I move past your body
when you die
or will my own half-cells
die with you

when I was a girl
you told me time was forever
and still wolves found me
in dreams

when your teeth are gone
will they still eat me
or fall from your mouth
when you throw up the bones

will you leave them to me
or will you always need them
as weapons for wolves
and dreams

eap

2008-11-12T23:41:00.003-05:00

hairline fracture

the ribs are a fragile cage
for her heart’s urgings

your boney skullcap
hot brain
firing nerves
eyes, brow, hands

tongue, lashings of teeth-
scarred knuckle, muscle
control, those abs
pects, the six-pack
punches

through bruised organs
she hears their music
in her ears and heart’s distal
pulse, your ancient cadence

fists
face
feinting

bloodlines traced
back to the cave
beneath fractured ridges
into the bone
eap

Sons

2008-09-19T21:42:00.006-04:00

Male of Elizabeth

for my sons, and my grandson, not-yet-born
I wake in the morning
his voice in my body
a language I can’t follow
a crescendo, a leaky instrument

he was a boy with a voice
that betrayed him
a sharp blade
for an Adam’s apple and words
that hit the window like sleet

he left me remembering
the quiet thrum of rain
the day he was born
the blade that saved him
after a dive to grab his waving arms

I still tread
in that water and blood
of the child who was named
male of Elizabeth
the patchwork of our bodies
living, breathing
speaking broken languages
photo by Sally Mann

2008-08-17T23:42:00.002-04:00

What they see by the light of candles

I was the old woman
visible to neighbours
only in conversations
on front porches
at the ends of driveways
glancing back to my darkened house
where I watched them from windows

onto the world, unseen because you can’t see inside
when the lights are out

they wonder when there is no garbage
on Sunday night
nor on Monday morning when the trucks pass by
they ask if I’m alive in here
or so I imagine

I’ll be found one day
when someone follows a nose
to the body, disintegration
escaping cracks in the mortar

when they find me, they’ll understand
something about garbage
the heap beside my unmade bed
the heap on the dining room table
shit overflowing the litter box
electricity shut off months before
those unopened envelopes in my mailbox

I know what they’ll ask
when the money is found
under the mattress
no one wants to touch
defeat
how you can’t stop someone
intent on not meeting the neighbours
under any light but that cast by candles

waving shadows on the bedroom wall

eap

2008-08-16T00:36:00.002-04:00

Happy with little and still

her eyes are cloudy
the cataracts
she won’t have removed
because of the scalpel

the children
won’t understand
there can be no knives
in this life now

light has moved
from the eye to her face
happy with little
and still, living there

the laughter of her children’s children
rises over the lake
and she catches
the father of each in the flame

of memory, every bright hair of them
gleaming in the sun

eap

2008-08-14T01:54:00.007-04:00

Late Fragment

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

Raymond Carver

2008-08-14T01:17:00.002-04:00

Although we know that after such a loss the acute state of mourning will subside, we also know we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else. And actually this is how it should be. It is the only way of perpetuating the love which we do not want to relinquish.

S. Freud

2008-07-28T01:08:00.004-04:00

If wandering, considered as a state of detachment from every given point in space, is the conceptual opposite of attachment to any point, then the sociological form of the ‘stranger’ presents the synthesis, as it were, of both these properties.

here

via wood s lot

2008-07-27T06:35:00.004-04:00

Impressions, Morning

you came along
before I was out of bed
loving the smell of milkweed
and wet grass before dawn

you were out scratching
the bark off a tree
though it was birch
and you let the bugs in

the same way your wet feet
muddied the kitchen floor
all the way
to the coffee

the sun rose with you
and your cup went along
to the boat shining white
in your hand

tilting your head
dark eyes in the sky
the way you slid over water
your prints dried
on the floor

eap

2008-07-18T04:42:00.003-04:00

of a god and love
for Paul
July 9th, 2008

they cradled you into the car
wrapped in a white flannel blanket
a few last sprigs of red
hair feathered upward

before you left home
pale kisses
from your brother
missed your cheek

I left out my goodbye
crawled onto the rear seat
my books sliding to the floor
you shuddered, Mother shouted

rain, the bees coming in
could kill you
in arms that couldn’t clutch
you tight enough

I thought you were arguing
yourself alive
for just those moments
while I left you

the last things I remember:
your thin arms
reaching for me
and one long sound
a moan rising

was it me
watching from the sidewalk
as Father drove
you on?

alone, in your cortege
I remember
what we sang:

love
I’ll always love you

but enough of love now

eap

My Boy

2008-07-09T16:40:00.005-04:00

Paul Joseph Pickett

June 19, 1962 - July 9, 1968

40 years my boy, 40 years.

Miss you. Miss. You.

words don't work

"The Mourning Parents"

Käthe Kollwitz

Old Country

2008-06-26T21:36:00.005-04:00

My grandparents, Reg and Ethel Drew, called this place "The Old Country". They spoke of it constantly. It took me a very long time to realize that this meant that they longed for it, always.

I went to Devon when I was 39. Sometime, I will post pictures of my friends and I walking toward Paignton from the West. We are drifting, wandering "little people" in those pics. I have stones from the seashore. "She sells seashells ..."

We drank warm, brown beer at a pub on the undercliff. Played darts a little drunk.

Walked your ground; breathed your air.

I hope I can find the photo of the Monkey Puzzle Tree with me sitting beneath it. As you always hoped I would.

Ethel May Scoble Drew

2008-06-26T06:06:00.003-04:00

That's my grandmother, up there in the hills. You can't see her? I can.

Grand she was. Today is her birthday. If she were alive, she would be 105. She died when she was 93, but for me, years before. That makes the loss greater.

That's the Devon countryside in which she was born, but from which she wandered.

She sailed from Southampton on the Queen Mary when she was 22. Alone. A young woman who had never travelled far from her home in Paignton, set out for the new world, to meet her husband in Toronto.

The Queen docked in Montreal and she took the train from there. She told me that she looked out into that treed and sometimes watery landscape, terrified. The distance. The darkness. The forests. Fear of Indian attack.

I wonder, now, if she infected me with that fear. For a time when I was quite young, she lived next door to me, with Grandad and Uncle Tom, in the place by the Great Lake. When my mother ran out of any kind of food, I was sent next door to borrow it from Nana. I only remember the night trips. Dead of winter. The treed hill rose up behind the houses. I remember only the closeness of night. And the fear of an Indian raid. I always took those journeys on the run, loaves of bread squashed in my hands.

Ethel was the kindest person I ever knew. Have ever known.

I just realized how Margaret Atwood this all sounds.

Oh p.s. Nana, you also infected me with song.

Don't Call Me Ishmael

2008-06-26T05:43:00.001-04:00

I wanted an anonymous place but I find it difficult to create that space. It seems appropriate. Somehow. Everything is vague. That's what it's like when you've wandered much too far from home.

This is the life I am supposed to be living. It's always been irregular. For years I wondered, "Was I born this way?"

Now, it doesn't matter. It's been going on for far too long.

Are nomads nomadic because of the desert environment, or did they find a desert environment that suited their need to wander? How long did they search, wandering as they sought what they needed? And did they ever understand what they were looking for?

I've been talking about "gaslighting" for years. I used to think the concept arose from the Alfred Hitchcock movie where Grace Kelly's husband is trying to kill her and, while he's at it, he feels the need to first make her believe she's crazy. I can't remember how, quite. But I do think the gaslighting had to do with the death-dealing.

I learned a few weeks ago, while googling something entirely different, that the concept actually came from a Victorian detective novel. Of course. It would. All those Londinium gaslights, flickering in the sickly fog. That would do it.

Funny what happens when you start in one place and just set about the business of moving.

Nights spent under the gaslights.

It's part of the adventure to do what comes, to write what comes, and just put it out into the night. It would be interesting if someone wrote back. But, as always with those who are too far from home, without address, it's not expected.