You Know Your Place
I knew it would be
just like this, that you would go
back again, cross roads,
through back yards, along
fences, ducking here, dodging
there to get back home,
no convincing you
that we have moved on
until one time I did not
find you anywhere.
August 29, 2009 10:10 AM
Were you looking for her/him? Were you too returning to the same haunts? Ah, the pain of letting go.
ReplyDeleteGreat images. I applied them to the poem, but ended up going back into my own past thinking of attempts to run away.
ReplyDeleteThe imagery in the poem is a direct memory of a particularly awful night in the long ago when I realized my life had just imploded and left me in an intolerable position. It was I who ran and she who lacked the courage to even acknowledge the need. And so, this poem is she speaking of me in my imagination after I had gone to Arizona.
ReplyDeleteI wanted to write, I'm sorry you were in pain, but between you and I those simple words aren't exactly the truth, for we know that great things can come of pain. And so I have to say the words imploding and intolerable are so large, I wish they were just a little softer. And too, of course, I hope great things came of the pain.
ReplyDeleteYour poem speaks well. I like that you have played with perspective. I'm always only guessing.
xo
erin
That pain of course led to the rest of my life, more or less directly. I would not have ended up with that wife nor with Oregon in that way, and thus not with the livelihood I still keep in play in my life. I would not have met my colleague and not got the degree I have either. Other things would have happened. Things could easily have got much worse. Looked at in that way, I was being born and this period was the birth canal. I have to imagine that hurts being squeezed and expelled from the nurturing warm dark and the muffled sense of the world from inside the womb.
ReplyDelete