home is memory

where do stories happen? she had an intimation, a sensation even,

they happened behind the bridge of her nose. or maybe, she thought slipping fingers beneath sock to feel that bone that protrudes there, maybe they don’t happen at all, or the happening is the putting together and falling apart, the crack in the bedroom wall:

the days are losing regularity, the punctuation of sleep, now omnipresent, has lost its significance: and besides, this home has no curtains,

but at my outdoor desk, the shadow of a maple tree, the sunlight sideways through the leaves: the mowed lawn slopes down to the creek, bordered by supple knee-height nettle and canopies of motley trees,

in my room i want this baroque: chambers adorned with narrative frescoes, recollections of people and their gods, velvet curtains with crystal frills, an ashtray encrusted with diamonds, tiny binoculars and a sterling silver nutcracker

in summer i’ll make my way around the country. i’ll sleep in gully against backpack; i’ll bathe in bucket beside creek; i’ll bury things in yard. things have made memory weak. i’ll meet another traveler. i’ll make up some name; she’ll do the same, we’ll be in on it and reborn together: quarreling suitors, aimless, hungry, and alive,

she’ll give me some worthless thing.

it would be to go from home toward an unknown happening, an aria, malefic, ungraspable, the memory of a dream:

going back and forth, in thoughts that exhaust it, is the real motion of remembrance, wheedling toward a future unhappening home

here, the shadow of a bird alights on that of a branch. here, a house stood, for drumming of rain, thumbing on table, heavy shawls pressed with incense. now a cool breeze blows between my legs, carries the bird back to the forrest

like when i tried to catalog, room by room, the contents of that pretty apartment: how could i have known the ceiling, the chandelier, the cat, the little kitchen, would not be worth it? i shouldn’t bring the cat into this. the cat did nothing wrong. i am angry at that talentless writer, that despicably glib, conspicuously depressed and poorly dressed writer, who let me a room for four semi-miserable city months.

i’m not angry any more. righteousness is my enemy: how to write it and the city? what appears there, that self-styled world's home? it is, in fact, undeniably, the center of that world but it depends on what window you’re looking through, if you have one, from mine were humble brownstones, storefronts, poly-synchronous passersby. all of them virginia woolf. all of them home.

now on southward sloping hill, doing penance. yet all is remote here; the past, at times, i make myself believe, the past is swallowed without evidence rising to surface. still, this loneliness, dislocation is a succor and a recompense to the penitent. would i look her in the eye — hiding my tears by holding them in — the suffering would be greater, reckoning more elusive. the house humming behind me, the house gone, the stroking of crickets in the yard, these my witnesses. my breath mean, my eyes teary and bulging from the pale redness of my face. again balanced by peaceful feeling: to be at bottom of self and all the world, lower and slower than snail on seafloor. and this little ashtray beside me, from which matchsticks protrude like masts of sinking ship, crossed and redoubled, stirred by angry ashy sea:

i say that now, not remembering, just seeing through fog a flicker of candlelight. extinguished. the cat waving its tales, rubbing my leg as i creep through the window and climb into bed

that crack that ran the length of the wall, that striving from floor to ceiling: she would go the long way home