I keep thinking about the end of One Hundred of Solitude: this image of Macondo (from the Bantu meaning “banana”) town lingering long past it’s death, a place of mirrors swept away and erased. Erased like the biblical town of Ephesus. This old house, built at the dawn of the American half-century in 1946. Strong bones like all houses hewn and built by hands like my Grandfather’s, who also built houses. Strong bones and soft plaster like the non-irony of life being just being the process of the body dying. This house was built on swamp land to service a race track that exists only as a plaque — which is only slightly less than memory but not exactly gone.
There’s a dream here that isn’t mine but I’ve embraced it anyway. Or maybe it ensnared me. The difference depends on the day. I’ve ex-wives and ex-girlfriends who called this part of my antagonistic world view. Amanda, my heart, calls it just me. She usually smiles when she says it.
Upkeep. It all boils down to upkeep. Bodies. Houses. The rot bubbles up from the basement, descends from above. When pastoral poets write about rain they so often go on about baptisms and redemptions. I’m pretty sure I did the same when I was a pastoral poet. But I’ve been out in the rain too much in the past 15 years, and too subject to its whittling effects. Live near a large enough body of water and you see it not as a peaceful baptism but a redemption like the desert’s salvation of Ephesus. The things that replenish us are the same things that break us down. The human body is mostly water. The arthritis in my right hip acts up in the rain. Rain seeps into this swampy ground and into the sump pit… or it did before some drainage problem outside the house caused it to back up through the floor drain, a problem for one of God’s Plumbers to handle:
there exists security / just don’t watch
the river crest // blink long
check them eye•lids for potholes
brother / while the maples start
their slow bloom/ as starlings re-
-build their nest in
the chimney next door
as the mud dries out enough
to go ahead / mop the floor //
nostalgia sings on the radio / far
away oh run so far / run run /
remember :: it was all
one long
bside of desperate
(from GOD’S TIRED PLUMBERS, my crown of sonnets chapbook.*)
This dream that isn’t mine but might as well be. It doesn’t matter whether it ensnared or I embraced. Am I nourishing it? Or is it killing me?
When the water finally gets me, breaks these bones down to dust and washes them away, will it really matter?
[* Email me at dirtysacred(at)gmail.com to purchase a copy or pay what you can to dirtysacred via VENMO or PAYPAL.]