Nostalgia

"Nostalgia - it's delicate, but potent.  In Greek, "nostalgia" literally means "the pain from an old wound." It's a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn't a spaceship, it's a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards... it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It let's us travel the way a child travels - around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know are loved."

Don Draper, Mad Men

Perished

I float on the

currents of my past

An empty gaze

catching memories

Still your face is gone

Ant Hill

The ant hill always faces one direction - which one I forgot - and supposedly you could use this knowledge to find your way back home, would you for unknown reason find yourself lost in the woods. I suppose I'd die face down in the moss me, for darn it- I can't remember the direction the ant hill always faces.

I angered my mother when I kicked down an ant hill once when we were strolling in the woods. Perhaps she was worried we wouldn't find our way back home? Perhaps was she worried she had raised a particularly cruel child? She told me it takes those small bugs years, YEARS to build a hill. Perhaps she was was angered by the idea of work coming undone?

My mother worked a lot. She wiped my snotty nose and that of my brother and before us that of my older brother too. She tucked in old, forgotten men and women at night and held their hands upon their last breath. Her pay check was a kick to her ant hill as was her tired eyes.

The eyes of my mother were gray and the skin around them sagged. They were the eyes of an energetic bird or perhaps gazelle, always on the move. She moved across our wooded floors, cleaning, cleaning, screaming, painting, crying, laughing.

Her laughter made our house into a home and since the day of her last breath - her hands unheld - I suppose the ant hills can face whatever direction they please for there is no longer a home to which I need to be guided to.

The Things That Never leave

Those are all the things that will never leave me:

Mother’s firm grip around my tiny hands

The first kiss (I thought I’d never get it!)

my first bike ride

and how I rode it over and over and over again

Those are all the things that will never leave me:

My husband’s hope at the alter

and his tears as I left

The way the wind has hit my face

thousands and thousands and thousands of times

Those are the things that will never leave me:

My earliest childhood memory

And how the entire world was all made up of snow

My mother’s footsteps over that frozen lake

the calmness of the mind

Those are the things that will never leave me:

How my newborn child redirected my being

and how my first rejection

felt like a black abyss in my gut

The sweet scent of my lover’s chest

And the lightness of the heart when in love

The angelic faces of my sleeping children

The faces of my children.

Those are the things that will never leave me

Home

My heart lays

upon my mother's

kitchen table

sprinkled with bread crumbs

and surrounded

by family sharing

their days' tales

My limbs are spread

through rusty water pipes

helping save

mother's sweetpeas

sprinkling foreheads

of over-heated,

playing children

My eyes:

cracked facades

facing a Nordic

summer's night

My lips:

the flowerbeds

framing the edges

of the yard

My home:

resides within

Evanescence

Tiny knees-

green of grass,

brown of gravel

red of blood

The sting of that

alcohol in the wound

mother's calming voice

Teenaged lips

wet of your spit

and his,

bloodflow-swollen

inflammed red

the assuring touch

of that firm grip

Ripe fruit is

not granted

the right

to fall

neither down,

nor in love

Shame on you,

for the humanity

of your failures!

Impossibility is:

catching life’s evaporations:

Futility-

Searching love’s stability