The Innisfree Poetry Journal www.innisfreepoetry.org by Julie Preis COLLECTION Either I've just moved in or have lived here for years without knowing it.Either I recognize this place or I don't. Something is familiar, a patch of lawn, a fireplace, scuff marks on linoleum. I never know if I'll find refuge, chaos, the beginning or end of flight. Usually I find a mess. Truckloads of junk have arrived before me. I must furnish the place with torn fabric and scraps of lumber. I must establish residency. Always there are people milling, intent on important errands. If they would hold still I could ask them how to begin. Neighbors drop off children I must care for. I scramble to remove dangerous objects. The house is a sketch, a skeleton of beams. Or a living presence whose walls breathe and floors rise up to meet me. Just as I get my bearings a door opens into another wing I didn't know existed. I climb a staircase and discover sky above an artist's loft, a rooftop city humming with life. I find a suite of empty rooms, waiting. I'm always alone when this happens. All noise falls away. Some hidden window in me opens then. A bird, released by my heartbeat, flies into the room, circles invisibly, alights on the sill. POEM FOR FALL Some say the homing urge prevails. Against danger, against reason, blood calls to its own, Return, you'll always have a place. Touch down, lift off, soles of the feet burned by forgotten fires. Some never return believing nothing is there. One stays, one leaves, another tries to leave or to return but cannot. Each tracks the other imagining regret. Sought for or not the power of home pulls and repels, creates itself over and over in lamps at dusk, scuttle of leaves on the porch, the way basement stairs release the damp perfume of cardboard cartons long since put away. Copyright 2006-2012 by Cook Communication |