neglect and nostalgia

Neglect and Nostalgia

I saw stones that had come

From a great purple distance

Huddle around the front door.

                                                Charles Simic

                                                Note Slipped Under a Door

I

We moved in with drifting

snow and boxes and stones and pieces

of our old

lives stacked like stove

wood in our arms.  In all
of it we discovered a foundling,

and a new crevice or crack
needed, or an altar,

to be a god grim or grinning again

momentarily, some

of it is now being

snowed on, what was used in our last
house to prop the unleveled door

had gone and fallen again off
a small cliff
of moss again, neglected.

Some of it is under cover and still

in boxes, like feathers

of dead birds, no use at all

for what they were created

and made to do: lift the you

that was in the breast-

bone of the crow.  You know
I have a penchant for crows, don't
you? I’ve collected their feathers
for years and their caws for that
matter, caught offerings on abandoned
woods roads

and they hang some above my head

on a wall in my new old
home and make me

imagine make me regret

make me briefly insane.

II

Still, I have come to feel the terms

brief and momentarily

as shifts in definition

and being and not all linear.
Have you?

Despite that I sometimes

frantically want it to be

that if it is nothing but arterial,

that if it had a specific

beginning it could never be

pinpointed or precisely            tracked

with an eye or a finger

or even sitting close and still

like an ear?  I’ve gone

way off the rails here.  I’ve lost

some compass of my belongings,

simple as pots and pans and bedding,

simple as coffee and the kettle

it’s made in.  I can’t get back. 

But maybe my cheeks can,

taking in the fragrance of the day.

Maybe my tongue

will come close enough

to what I was aiming for though even

that is washed off as quickly

as it is set down, and the rest

of it is up to the nose, how I

draw the thing back

to my face and lips

time and time again, how

the smell of it drifts

and wears thin

and just as someone is calling

out one of the several names

I am known by and it bites me

sharp and draws blood

and I blush and don’t hesitate

to put it to my tongue and I’m

okay but am asked anyway

but can’t say why

only it’s nothing really

it’s nothing.  It isn’t anything

I packed in the van

but like a stray it followed me

and who among me can shake 
what follow them thus

and who among me trusts it

is will be there until spring

until what’s fallen on it
from the start

of November melts off entirely?

III

and I kick myself

even though they’re only

stones, oceans and oceans
of stones stowed
and stowing
like old walls
like stray animal pounds

for mine and everyone else's
neglect and nostalgia