Let go, go back.

Well. I drafted another poem, sitting in a hotel room in Saratoga Springs, NY, before going out to spend the rest of the day exploring. I want to share it because I am awed that poems are starting to come to me again after so many years; also it stands as a report on recent days. I did find my old college poetry again a couple of days ago, and I am awed by how good I really was. And, I think, how far I could have gone had anyone really taken me up and mentored me in those years -- I had good creative writing class experiences, a few (there wasn't the culture of it then there is now, at least where I went to college and then graduate school), but no one gave me a sense how to purse this as a calling. I am struggling with a tremendous sense of lost opportunity and power . . . but trying to hold onto the thought that maybe not everything is lost. I'm not sure where poetry fits given that I have been trying to write personal essay, but I don't see it as an either/or thing. As long as I write, it seems like a good thing.

Yesterday I left my family's home symbolically -- it probably isn't the last time I will be there before it is sold (the closing date of which is uncertain, although the contract is being drafted) but it might be the last time I have stayed there; if the closing comes fairly quickly (the purchasing family needs to sell their own house which should go on the market soon) it will probably be cleared out with an estate sale before I see it again. I don't even know how to process this -- it is probably impossible to do. But anyway, this poem tries to distill one experience of it.

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Counting Breaths

Counting breaths in my family home
the morning before I leave it.
The thighs press against the woven seat.
The abdomen lifts and falls.

The lake glitters coldly past tall windows
in this belated spring.

In 1918 a family bought this house.
In 2018 a daughter of that family buys it back
after fifty years. And this daughter goes on
to what I don’t yet know.
to what I knew but somehow gave away,
hoping it is not too late to find again.

Counting breaths, each number rises and falls,
reaches ten to start over again.
Quieting the mind as a bird calls,
as the furnace cycles on, as the world
is lost and present, decades whirling round.

A day earlier in a box I found my writing
from college, when being a poet was all I wanted.
I tried not to scream for the lost power.
In those years too I tried to watch my mind,
counting breaths in a gabled dorm room
as a same spring moved trees beyond the window.

Thirty-five years later, I can see everything
I want and wonder about is much the same.
Trying to count and watch again.
Numbers ticking over, the same body breathing
though now a voice on my phone teaches me.
What is lost, found, possible
if everything is present?

Let go, go back. Let go, go back. Let go, go back.
At the edge of awareness
breath summons the whisper of a poem.
Breathe out. Open the eyes. Close the door.
A day later, count again and write it down.