Departures involve choices that are understood only in hindsight, and to make a home in one place precludes having a different kind of home in another.
When I write with your words it causes a physical response, a warmth in my skin, a corresponding echo in my stomach and my heart. I write this in a very unrooted place, my body full of transients, a spectacularly beautiful messy fist of emotions, a lot of active sadness. My garden grows like a jungle here, layers and layers of green ripped open by wind, so much more wild than my few plants in pots clinging to the balcony. To the trees here I am still Someone Else, Someone Else walking around the moss, taking photos of the mushrooms, frightening the baby snakes. I have just arrived here from somewhere else; half of my belongings still in boxes damp from the other side of deep water.
To be split, as I feel split, between moments, territories, lives, is like a wound. The shattering nature of changes reminds me I'm nursing a long-term fracture. It does not leave, heal over, cannot, because it has become part of me, a fissure in the stone that gathers water, holds life. A tidepool, a rugged changing seascape where every moment requires resilience. All of us are fragmented, many people have more than one word for hurt, every new word offering a way to understand to approach the work of being a self.
The disorder of love is not neatly unravelled, understood, solved. I learn to find a peace within the complexity of what I am, what I was, what I am becoming. once I was a wild person, but i write now of being a home, like water
live every day like its the last line of a poem. I had a writing professor once who said every good poem could be only its last line. And I don't think I agree with that but you often remind me of the last line in the poem A Blessing By James Wright: "If I stepped out of my body I would break Into blossom."
But perhaps it would be better to use "I who have always believed too much in words" from Fly by W. S. Merwin
Why else write a poem if not to hope to answer some ugliness with language that reveals the beauty, the power, and the generosity of something that hurts, if not to learn what language can teach us about love.
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