Home

I wrote this for the most part in 2006, after I had moved to Arizona after living in Brooklyn. It is a meditation on the essence of what home really is and of place.

It was published in Tanygrisiau, Blaenau Ffestiniog, Gwynedd, Wales, in the United Kingdom by Coffee House Press. I’m sure both me and my poem were as exotic to them as they were to me. It was also published at a time when I thought I’d never be able to write another book, so there was that. But what truly freaks me out is that I had this very strong feeling/image about a rag rug and family and my own travels when writing it.

Early 2020 my sister sent me this rag rug she had made me as a housewarming gift at my new little temporary place. Eight months later she was gone. I explain these things to myself now as warnings of a sort. What is more real? Our dreams or so-called objective reality?

Home

I.
Sitting in dark houses miles away
houses filled with dismembered furniture
incomplete yet filled
the dark braided rug of family
placed over the expanse of floor
colors red & black
in shut up places

You are living strange thoughts
your real house
the matters of your life
hair shards & smells
some include you
like attic boxes propped open
years rustle like leaves
in the shadow places of your head
you can see them rolling
Like a scroll
10 houses ago

The smell of Brooklyn in the summertime
on your clothes now like the unleavened bread
In the kosher delis down the street.

II.
Each day a leaf falling
one like so many others
a stack of thin sheaves
layers, boxes
of paper

How it ended here, in the desert
surprisingly verdant with lupines
and Indian Paintbrush
but with tumbleweeds, too
blowing in the wind like a dust-bowl memory

And the highway is king not the destination
those towns in between rootless
by their own inclination
the residents all here by accident.

Ron, the vinyl sign guy
with the shop at the edge of town
one mile long
few blocks from the Yavapai Apache casino
says he’s from Wisconsin and that
“Things are different here.”