Home II

Home, like “aum” cut short,

A fragment of energy suspended in solution,

Losing the definition of “home”.

That which may be calculated through each callous of the foot,

mine, each our own,

every abrasion every triumph to trace back with greatest precision

to the rock of the path that was home.

 Less under-way and more under-foot,

not a process so much as a concept-

a spinal concrete to carve your name in and bleed your fist on.

Home, that thing that ought not to be page three, facebook photos, and on:

more in feeling than in fondness, dare I want,

dare I conceptualize, ask the lips for the words of the wanting,

all the beautiful ideas, shells of  reality

that might make a paleontologist out of me

given the day and the radio.

It is the roots without the tree,

Carried some hours by car and $233 by train,

Then propped up against a landscape where trees grow,

And the family and the friends and the mind and the matter,

Like the centralized paper of a fortune catcher

Unfolded and found in its corners.

There’s a harrowing simplicity in saying “lost”

Like a feeling, like a place,

A specific inaccuracy that stains its appeal

And then there it is, still,

Lost, like maybe I’m the fragments

Because home is the fragments

And I can only find one inasmuch as I may find the other.

I’ll mention now that these are two things

I did not mean to misplace,

In fact found for sure, held in my hands like

Laying in a field and wrapping your fingers around the grass,

And you won’t pull it from the ground

Nor will you stay until it dies;

You give it immortality by existing entirely in that moment.

Then lost, much like lost,

And you ache for everywhere you were last,

Make a picture-book of home (bound and all)

To not look at, to pine for less

Until it is contained in its stark two-dimensionality.

Maybe we’re all a little on the shelf.

Maybe it seeps back into us anyway.

Then home is abstractly represented in oneself,

That we are the collection of area code romances

And crisp afternoons, familiar passages, growing grounds,

The moments with the people who snagged our fabric

Enough to let the light through where we see it now.

So the picture is not yet complete, but I might carry it

In myself until I have a wall to hang it on.