Forgive Me

my long absence. Four PhD level classes and two teen sons occupy a woman’s time. Anyway…

This morning I’m thinking about nostalgia—a “longing for home” (as the word breaks down from the Greek to the Latin) and what it means to have a sense of longing but no tangible sense of home. This summer, I made the long haul from Utah to Wisconsin to visit family and friends and bodies of water. For the first time in years, I waded out from Lake Michigan’s shore in the backyard where I grew up, and I knew it as I did then—the high brick of my alma mater and a long line of enormous houses to the east; Kidney Island, a smokestack, and the big blue slide at the amusement park to the west—but I felt this strange remove: like seeing a lover after years unspoken and realizing that the familiarity's in stone but you are simply different. It was comforting and slightly sad … peaceful, perhaps.

I live in the high desert now, 2,000 miles away from that freshwater shoreline. Here we have the Lake Bonneville shoreline trail, which marks a lake receding. What’s left is the Great Salt: water poisoned by salt with no roads out. It is a stagnant, shallow pool that supports nothing but brine. I am enamored by its stillness, the way it reflects a second set of mountains and sky, but I refuse to float in it—not because I’m disgusted by its smell (frankly, it sort of reminds me of the bay of Green Bay, by smell) but because something about it saddens me.

This morning I read this article about a deal Colorado made with Kansas and Nebraska back in the ’40s—what the media is referring to as a “water bill.” Apparently Colorado owes these sister states over four billion gallons of water. It terrifies me to think of water as currency for so many reasons. The obvious—we are water, and we need water. The personal—where there is water there is some sense of peace for me. The frightening—it will be a fight for water that will bring us to our knees. Or to taking each other out at the knees. When states come calling for a long overdue water debt, I get nervous for this “canary-in-the-coalmine moment for the west.”

Any sense I have of home I now carry with me, hokey though that may be. I’ve made peace with the place I've always referred to as home for the most part—that water, that yard lined with lilacs, where hornets gutted green apples as I barefooted up trees, the people who I grew confused by and away from as I began to understand them—so now when I think of feeling nostalgic, I have to ask myself: if I carry home with me, for whom or what am I longing? I come up with little more than an idea of a girl or a family or the feeling of the tide rushing water over my feet and simultaneously receding.

It reminds me of many things I’ve written, of course, since water is so central to my work, but I’ll share with you a few things. The first is my poem “The Study of Lakes” from In the Carnival of Breathing, which appeared originally in The Dirty Napkin, which I've just reposted on Ink Node, and which considers this “water bill” and “canary-in-the-coalmine” mentality.

The second is an excerpt from a piece of nonfiction I recently dug up from my old files—from my MA days (damn I feel old). This is the first paragraph of "As the Water Recedes," a lyric essay in which I explore anger & water, their push & pull, and how one more/less saved me from the other and kept me sane as a girl growing up in a household that was anything but calm:

"The weeds have grown taller than any man I’ve kissed here, where the water has held its breath and pulled its shoulders from the shoreline. Broken bottles and rusted cans, empty shotgun shells and plastic handles of children’s shovels now jut up with the dead carp and bullheads from sand that’s turned to muck. This is not the place where I grew up, barefoot from rock to rock in play paced by tides, along the shore of the bay of Green Bay, where my family’s house is set. It isn’t the shore that my father knew, before the flood of ’73 filled basements with green water and fish eggs, before he became a man who smokes but never runs or swims or loves a woman, when he still wedged his small boat in the backyard where grass and sand met at the silver light post, which worked then. Now he mows it all down, all those green weeds whistling where once there was water."

And this final piece is my newest poem (written yesterday), which will be here very briefly, so if you’ve made it this far, kudos to you! and check it out—feel free to weigh in, as always.

*missed me, missed me, now you gotta kiss me* -- why, as children, did we chant this as if it should be a punishment to kiss our mouths? anyway... no, this isn't my poem. here & gone.

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Finally, a shout out to the editors at Third Coast, American Poetry Journal, Barn Owl Review, and Country Dog Review who have been kind enough to select some of my poetry for upcoming issues: thank you, thank you, thank you! And to Ash Bowen for this generous review of ITCOB, which was featured last month in RATTLE.

Sorry to go on and on, all, but you know… this woman had some catching up to do.

Glad to be back. More to come…

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