lundi 2 avril 2012

5022 NE Going



Going going gone
Melaina kicked me out
then turned it back over
when they foreclosed on her
It was both our house after all
We ate beans for three months
to save the down payment

The small green room
for Victoria
The medium blue
for Monte and Paul
We skidded over the long wooden
boards of the master bedroom
and Melaina put up a
ballet bar and mirrors
for my daily pliés

Vic had a piano
Monte had a baseball glove
and Paul was a golden-haired boy
amid Filipinos and Yakimas
a two-year-old sleepy head
falling into his bowl of
dal at the kitchen table

I studied French and made
pate à chou and blanquette of chicken
and on the weekends
Melaina made the best
lumpia and punsit
this side of the Pacific
She worked long days on
big machines she mastered
just as she mastered the
Toyota squareback in
our barn of a garage

Our yard was an acre or more
until they sold the back half
to the Tonganese villagers
who hacked down the
laurel hedges with machetes
We'd look out over the
red-leafed yard, then
down the tree-lined street
of Northeast Going
We watched the harvest moon
rise over the school yard
at the end of the block

We were deliriously happy
then fundamentally stressed
then self-exiled
We never spoke about
the terminal grief of
our own abusive childhoods
We finished three years there
five years all together
five years of trying so damn hard
to be normal 



2 commentaires:

moigo a dit…

A very sweet account of an effort to build from ruins. I see the Tonganese villagers cutting down the laurel hedge as destroying the illusion that the past can be obscured. Don't know if you intended it that way. I understand self exile. I found it difficult to build a life from that position - unmoored. Kudos to a life well lived and a poem well written.

D'un Renard a dit…

J'admire ton courage dans l'adversité stimulant ta poésie...