LEAVING MY SWEET BEAUTIFUL HOME

LEAVING MY SWEET, BEAUTIFUL HOME

There are untold numbers of very famous people whom I am not. For instance, I am not Emily Dickinson, although I think Emily and I could have been friends over her edible flower-decorated gingerbread and tea. I am not Georgia O’ Keefe, although I can imagine sitting on one of her flame-red couches and watching her sketch gorgeous fruit bowls and shimmering sunsets. I am not Jane Austen, although I can summon up the image of me, listening in on her 18th-century gossip girl commentaries over a tureen of Mr Bingley’s celebrated White Soup.

Yes of course, I would never find myself on any of those celebrated sofas or in any of those salons because Emily, Georgia and Jane (If I may be so familiar) are back there in their centuries and and I, Liza Thalia, a minor poet, am here at my in my tiny village on the edge of small lake in Aurora, Oregon, tin the 2ist century.

I, Liza Thalia, am a not so young anymore, and probably a little drab- looking to boot. I am a poet with very little in the way of worldly goods (not counting my calico cat T.S), who will soon even be without a home, without (as the justly famous poet Mary Oliver put it) “my sweet and beautiful house.”

It seems as severe as asking a turtle to leave its shell behind!

But the memory of my sweet and beautiful house will stay with me always, like a bit of finished and polished poetry, as long as I can think and write yet another bit of verse, because this house has been the cradle, the nest, the lap, the inspiration for all of my writing these 17 years. This simple little white 18th-century clapboard farmhouse with its worn wooden shutters and lopsided weathercock atop the roof, with its slightly slanting floors that creak with every step, and its narrow pine wood staircase with the wobbly bannister. With its pungent cellar smelling of overripe apples and pers, and its stuffy little garrett above my bedroom looking out over the aging crab apple trees below.

This is the place where I have lived alone for 17 years, since my father passed. The place which has weathered so many rains, snowstorms and sunny days, the house that has sheltered me while I wrote. And wrote and wrote.

Even now, I sit at the round oaken kitchen table that smells like a thousand bygone meals, here in the middle of June, with T.S. curled up at my ankles, while the ruffled curtains at the windows ride on the warm breeze, I am rereading what I wrote two years ago on this day.

BEING LIKE CATS

I watch cats and wonder—

is spending half your life half-conscious

superior to how we humans divide up our days?

Is being asleep another way of being conscious?

being aware in a way that engages our senses and our feelers?

Is this stand-up sit-down life we live

A better place to be

Than being like cats?

And on a rainy autumn evening on my birthday last year in the rocking chair my father left behind in the sitting room, I remember my melancholy mood, when I wrote:

WHY?

Why isn’t there a stencil for these starfish hands?

Why isn’t there a paper-and-pin pattern for these kindergarten toes?

Why do words run across my brain like squirrels?

rippling across a lawn?

Why is there tomorrow when today is good enough?

Why does the page turn without me every day?

Why do I know there will be two more rabbits in MacGregor’s garden?

Even though MacGregor isn’t there?

Why?

And up in the garret smelling like dusty old books and forgotten toys, I sat against the wall and wrote this on a winter morning, watching the first snowflakes drift down.

SNOW

Who put down this

freshly starched linen bed sheet

Over everything

Over everything while we slept?

Who blanketed the dry, dark earth

Where might my bright garden be?

Tucking in the gnarly roots of my oak tree

While we all slept?

It found ground

Falling into place without a sound

Absent an autumn leaf

Or a bluebird's wing

Or the footprint of passing geese

I have even come in from the garden on a spring evening to put down my daisies and write:

FLOWERS HAVE FACES

Flowers have faces

Flowers smirk and wink and cringe

And raise their stamen— soft eyebrows

At our chatter

As we giants without roots or leaves or limbs walk among them

Flowers of extravagant beauty bend and bow to make room

For bigger creatures

Who can rise above them

And bring them down

To a life in a vase?

***

But now, I must take my cat from my lap , put him in a cage and put all my books, pads, diaries and journals into boxes, pack up bedding and go to another house tomorrow, in which I have never written a single line of poetry!

It is daylight on the kind of morning that makes you wish it would stay just as it was and as you are forever and ever.

How can I leave this house that has been my muse all these years? This house that has inspired all my poetry? Poems about life and death and sleeping cats and early snowfall? And so much more?

How can my sweet, beautiful home let me leave its embrace? Perhaps I would never write again once I stepped out the doorway of this special house that was so much more than a home.

Emily Dickinson, Pablo Neruda, and William Wordsworth, I recalled, all were strongly attached to their homes, which deeply influenced their creative work. Dickinson rarely left her Amherst homestead, while Neruda designed his Chilean homes to reflect his personality, and Wordsworth found his creative voice in his Lake District cottage.

I felt the tears well up and let them fall one by one without wiping them away as I reached for the door latch. It resisted my pull even with both hands on the latch..

I went to the back kitchen door. Another door I never lock. It was also tightly shut, resisting my strongest pull. Locked somehow from the outside. I felt as those I was pulling against the weight of years, of centuries, of time itself, of desire even. The desire of my sweet, beautiful home to keep me in its embrace. To keep me home, to keep me writing the very next poem.

FALLING IN PLACE

You can drown without water

You can fall without any soft earth beneath your feet

You can search for the childhood that never was

The floor that isn’t there

We are bone China cups on an unsteady shelf

In this bang bang life

****

Note: The poems above are the author's.