The place you once lived

I finished a poem just last night, having written the first draft while listening to "Naive Melody", by the Talking Heads, on repeat, a song to which JR brought my attention as "the song of his and Adrienne's relationship"--it is now the first song on my Sadness Type B mix, Home Sadness. Not to say I was particularly homesick when listening to it the other night, but looking for an energy which I was able to receive from the music. After finishing this initial draft, I immediately began revising, and soon found that this was actually the third generation of a poem I had written three or four years prior in the Reed library which at least slightly cracked-out. Here's the original poem:

[Spiders maneuver solely because they can.]

Spiders maneuver solely because they can.
Each time I ask to see my fingerprints on your skin
you turn away.
They look dulled you say,
but maybe you're rubbing them off
and you don't know you're rubbing them off,
maybe you don’t know how
Your name is too much for me.
Some words are heavy to lift,
your name is heavy to look at.
I am heavy to look at it, to say it,
to say it means
because I say it.

A year or two later, I cleaned it up, me being on the minimalist swing of the stylistic pendulum:

With You

some words are
heavy to lift,
your name is
heavy to look at,
I am heavy
to look at it,
to say it,
to say it
means because I say it.

And now, unknowingly, I've taken this thread with me:

The place you once lived

The foundation is poured cement,
then the bricks or wood and later, glass--
something rises where it wasn't before.

People walk in and out, carrying beds
and food and gifts and pictures;
and the garbage goes in the garbage can.

The young grow old and the old
grow old. The house grows soft
with their habits and memories,
which only ever grow heavier.

And the people make the house so heavy,
hanging their memories on every doorknob,
throwing their space into every space;
the house is so heavy they call it home,
and so soft they live inside of it
until they leave it,
still heavy and soft.

A home is a lover,
pregnant in knots of wood, autumn light,
in arrangements of furniture and bedtime stories--
pregnant in whatever it rests.
When you leave it, as you have and as you will,
having tried to make it brittle,
the feeling will still be that of tearing flesh from flesh.

A part of you will wish your love hadn't been so heavy,
it will want the strength to brush aside the weight of you;
it will be the place you once lived.



...Unfortunately, the blog won't show indentations, so that much is lost here. I'd suggest also reading the poem going line 1, 2-1, 3-2-1, and like this for each verse paragraph--with some imaginative interpretation of punctuation, it can shed new light on the poem, be rhetorically more forceful, or just plain fun to read in a different way.