Tag: home

how a body learns

to walk around it

The break never begins with noise,
but beneath buckled paint
behind the calendar we stuck
in hopes of growing unto faith
on walls, for blessed are the
fools, drunk on anticipation
of belief.

When it went, we learned to walk
around it, tremors disguised
as ordinary time, Baldwin’s history
sitting in the room until someone
notices the uninvited guest.

No siren sounds, no one is named.
Gravities are rearranged this way.
Pisa’s tower looked just fine
at ribbon-cutting time.

How easy it is, to mistake the wreck
for aftermath, never beginning.
Survivors find the hairline crack
and make a home in the months
before the flood runs.

Blessed the believers who
never
chart the damage, who lean in to
what’s left standing, call it home.

Against the Sirens

The telling

Tell me about it, we say, nodding at the most recent lament before us––in the chair, at the table, with the tired voice; in passing in the wild rush. Tell me, we repeat, like shaking a clean sheet to fold it before stacking with the others, who whisper in chorus at this gesture and its countless kin, constantly throughout each day, a plea for a home not quite remembered or fully left. Tell me about it. Tell me about that place I can always remember, ever almost. Whisper to me of this collective hush again, what I need to hear against the sirens.

Memory Shards

In the land of exile.

Once upon a time, when the bodies of the residents of former villages were still warm, so many had lived in homes, among families. After the wars, there was more and more talk of melancholy retrospection, this chronic looking back, this impulse to exhume the buried once upon a time that had so abruptly gone.

The word nostalgia had been coined centuries earlier, to describe the pathological homesickness afflicting soldiers separated from family and village. One doctor wrote extensively to insist that the condition be treated seriously as “a pathological state” rather than “an imaginary malady.” He saw death of a broken heart in the land of exile as something more lethal than enemy fire.

Reading these words, I begin to wonder if I know anyone who isn’t separated from family, who has ever known a village. Surely, there must be someone, but what is the word to name this longing for a place you’ve never known?

***

The doctor mentioned above is Raoul Chenu in “De la Nostalgie” whose insights appear regularly in connection with this topic. I was intending to write about the work of French photographer Willy Ronis (1910-2009), who was born on this day, but his work in post-war France naturally led me here. The word I was wondering about is hireath, of Welsch origin and not entirely translatable, which a student presented to me once as “longing for a place that never was.”

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