Please note that the poems and essays on this site are copyright and may not be reproduced without the author's permission.


Wednesday 30 April 2014

Moving House


.

Automobile landscape, Mill Valley, California: photo by Dave Glass (Dizzy Atmosphere), 1978, posted 1 April 2014


We were always moving out
ahead of the next wave yet not 
riding the last wave to the crest

history refracts the burden
and it all breaks back and down
and returns yet not the same, tipping

ill fitting puzzle bits of myth
captured and released
in transition to dust from real life

as time flows on away beneath
the ground
all the endless summer night long





House Movers, San Francisco. Victorian house being moved to Ellis Street just below Divisadero, Western Addition: photo by Dave Glass (Dizzy Atmosphere), 1977, posted 24 April 2012

3 comments:

Mose23 said...

ill fitting puzzle bits of myth

I seem to be covered in the stuff. Can't seem to wash it away.

Wonderful poem. The closing couplet - that "endless summer night" seems infused with ambiguity.

Poet Red Shuttleworth said...

Yeah, it's tough to drink from that cafe counter watermarked glass of iced tea. Our stars mostly just couldn't move us forward... get us moving on moving day. Jasus, but I sort of knew from the outset, so shambled too often to the local saloon to wait it all out. Others moved. So I heard. I crabbed in circles... big circles... a tumbleweed all season-blown to hell. So, Tom, I dearly appreciate your wonderful poem!

TC said...

Many thanks, Duncan.

The poem seems, yes, to bear a certain cargo of ambiguity, and not without spilling bits here and there.

And I hear you, Red.

Always dragging the family from one stop to the next, following that star which turned out to be a dust mote (probably laden with bacteria)... until at last the sky caved in under the sheer weight of foolishness, and here we are.