Summer snaps from my delightfully finicky Rolleiflex instax. The photos are never technically perfect (even after what feels an absurd amount of time adjusting settings and praying to the gods of light and shadow) but they always perfectly capture a moment. Each one is a felt-sense memory, and I love them for that reason.
This poem is like that.
In three weeks of bouncing between family branches and former homes, I haven’t been writing the way I like to. I’ve kept a faint haze, a barely-there distance, letting every experience and sensation be just that much softer. But in this final week, the haze has lifted; I feel everything in sharper focus (it is a lot); two poems came through within 24 hours. This is one I started scribbling at the beginning of the trip. It’s a snapshot of the dichotomous, fragmented feeling of being in a place I once called home. It’s a felt-sense memory, a moment in time, and I want to set it free while I’m still on this side of the ocean.
stranger in a strange homeland the Emerald City skyline is crowded, now. shards of glass - like the kind you’d fix along a wall to stop anyone crossing or nesting, shards as glass houses, palaces of boy kings - jut into the grey, racing to escape sacred earth, ties that bind us together. at night the city lights bear new constellations; I bear witness, reciting old poems. where are you going and what do you wish? the old moon asks the dreamer. standing in the stars he looks to his kin, he takes their hands, his answer begins with ‘we.’ down here we are crowded too in sleek rooms with no room to unpack nowhere to air out the bathing suits or anything else we’ve been carrying. we haul our baggage up into the loft (meant to feel like more space) onto a bed just big enough for careful rifling, for choosing who to be tomorrow. I am passing through like all the rest. they come for the gleam, I come for the soul, we all go once we’ve seen it up close. it’s exhausting trying to be all the time something new. where are you going and what do you wish? I ask the waning moon, just to listen night after night for the quiet.
hey, thanks for being here, sharing in a moment. let’s do it again soon. next week in Paris? be well, in the meantime.
//m
I love the refrain from a favorite book, and the idea of 'just passing through'...
Also remembering that 'Home is where you hang your hat'. Or perhaps your damp bathing suits, for a moment at least, until the next breeze freshens and soothes your "nets of silver and gold".
Love.
I love the thought of a bed being a place where you get to decide what to be tomorrow!