Returning
after a few years away.
When the illusion unravels
the distance
traveled between reality
and the belief
that everything remains the same.
Vestiges of memory,
like broken weathervanes
no less sacred, elevated
subject to the winds of change
and then replaced,
these spinning markers
of time and space.
Back home to reclaim
something of the beginning.
As the weeks go deeper in,
from Summer St. to Evelyn,
memories triggered by
the familiarity of voices,
the way each stair creaks,
the scent of the sea
carried through dreams
of blue herons returning east.
Upon arrival, the expanse of wings
were another Ave Maria
that sings to its crescendo
in the church ceilings
of every ceremony
that never leaves you.
Reinforced
on some inner map
that like a procession
through old Salem
reaches the outskirts in time,
a place we always come together
to process loss
and read the names of ancestors
engraved in marble.
In April skies and
northern squalls,
the clouds were a sadness disguised,
a wistful glance at St. Mary’s
whose bells were silent,
penitent as her empty pews
with the light coming through
stained glass lost in another era.
In the lobby of the Hawthorne
I envision my grandfather,
born the year its doors opened.
I get a sense of the times he passed through
this very room
with his wife Cos and her sister Nancy,
my great aunt.
When I learned of her passing
on the same day I returned,
the significance was not lost,
the synchronicity that burned
the impression of her absence
into the nooks of the place she spent
all those years. It was just as she left it,
as if out for an appointment but permanent.
You could almost hear the voice, the laughter
such was its vitality that it endures
like the essence that fills these rooms,
the scent of percolated coffee
lingering in the recesses
of a collective memory.
Many Christmases ago
when moth balls and winter
would cling to fur coats
like a hug among the gifts
of all that is familiar coming together.
Faces that fill photo albums
years later
I recall looking through all these layers
from your kitchen table.
There’s a cadence to the footsteps
of this process.
Residual sounds in the basement,
all the past residents that stir,
even the one you are named for.
The years of family history
embedded in those walls,
become unthinkable,
irretrievable loss
should houses like this
fall into the hands of strangers.
When everybody dies off
and is covered over,
who is the last to remember?
Knowing that change is inevitable,
that it will open every picket fence
and move among the rosebushes
and mulberry passages
that occupy what was once the universe
beneath the Giunta’s laundry line.
The scent is the last to remain there,
held deep in the soil.
In the flower pots and the bulkhead earth
that channel for a moment
all this information,
this connection to the past.
It is there in the basements,
those subterranean spaces,
that time capsule of inspiration.
It is like going full circle,
back to where it all began.
Now having gone through it
back around and leaving again
this time without the burden
of things having to
remain the same.
knowing in time an acceptance
even as the memories change
the way I tell these things to myself
without familiar wellsprings to draw upon.
yakskinpocketnotes 