Home Again Home Again

Your parents had reached a long slow time,

as animals do, the great center of their lives,

when they gleam in their fells as though eternally,

unchanging. Or as a day can seem eternal

if you lie and watch the full clouds, conscious

of your own time: you soon must get up and leave.

So father, mother, the small shabby town,

its patch of earth going on as though forever: you

forgot them there, where they’d been since you started out

and where you could find them again—as anyone

forgets what he has to lean on

so deeply and heavily that it wounds his side

and the pain seems only himself.

Ungrateful? So you accused yourself one day,

waking suddenly. And when you went at last

to look for them where they always are, they’d gone,

or were withered alive, their mouths opening and closing

without sound. The buildings had leaned still farther

toward the dusty weeds and crumbs of old machines

littered everywhere inexplicably. And now

who will explain them? Your grandfather’s day

is as absent from your thought as is your own

gestation. And check the records:

what is written down says nothing.

The volumes all avoid the one question you have.

They’re like the notebooks you kept in adolescence:

you turn the endless pages and you wonder,

what did I know or feel, how did I live then,

what was this violence and love, this utter newness,

invention that could sing water and light, raging

at the first touch of dying, never mentioning death?

You went back and the bones of your native town

were like that, records from which something had escaped:

a skeletal mill that roofed ghostly technologies

where men once worked, coughed, burnt, bled.

And that way they had permitted the long pageants

of the children. And their mothers—whose images,

vague, identical, stalk by in the nights,

each one sorrowing and serene, her starved, enamelled,

hard flesh torn, her dress the blue of late dusk,

the heaven behind her a work of flat blinding gold.

Copyright Credit: Albert Frank Moritz, “Home Again Home Again” from The Ruined Cottage (Toronto: Wolsak and Wynn, 1993). Copyright © 1993 by Albert Frank Moritz. Reprinted with the permission of the author.

Source: The Ruined Cottage (Wolsak and Wynn, 1993)