This week, in honor of National Poetry Month, we are proud to share an article by Writing It Real in Port Townsend Writers’ Conference faculty member Meg Files

I have lived in three countries, in eight states, in fifteen cities, and on one island. I have lived in nine apartments, one duplex, one condo, and nineteen houses. When I’m traveling and people ask where I’m from, I don’t know what in the world to answer. Make that: where in the world.

When I was invited to read at the Tucson Poetry Festival last year, I was delighted — but also worried that I didn’t have enough poems relating to the theme, “home.” But as I looked through the poems in my book, The Love Hunter, and also at some new poems, what I discovered was that virtually all of my poems are about home. They touch on the connections between home and family; they look at the meaning of home. They’re about journeys away from home: what home looks like from afar, how changed a relationship is in a foreign setting, how significant a journey is when there’s someplace and someone to come back home to.

I always thought that poetry’s true and inevitable subjects were love and death. Now I think maybe the one true subject is home. “Home is where we start from, but home is also where we are bound for, the place we always seek,” says David Steindl-Rast. “Home is the thing that is lost, the awaited return.” Home is where love was, where love is, where we seek love.

Arjan El Fassed writes: “Home is not a map, nor a birth certificate. It’s, as Mahmud Darwish, the famous Palestinian poet wrote, ‘your life and your cause bound up together.’ And before and after all of that, it’s the essence of who you are.” Home is political. . . is displacement. . . is where you are exiled from. The horrors of “ethnic cleansing,” “sectarian violence,” and “the final solution” are all about home: who belongs and who shouldn’t.

This summer, my sisters and I are traveling to Denmark to see the town where our grandfather was born. “Home” is the ancestral home, where we have never lived. Will we discover some collective memory of our roots? What will we learn about ourselves when we see where we are from?

****

I’ve been examining the meaning of “home” and answering my questions over the years through poetry as I wrote on various homes: childhood homes, lost homes, abandoned homes, found homes, and finally the home that remains when everything is burned away.

 

Before I present an exercise aimed at helping you take a similar poetry journey, I’d like to share some of what I’ve written.

 

First, a poem about someone who has left home: I visited a friend in Colorado who had just separated from her husband. When she left me alone in her new apartment, I’m ashamed to say, I got snoopy.

 DIANE’S NEW APARTMENT
She is at that stage
where she has painted
one wall bright against all
the given white, where
the new compact sound
system is prepared to give
her music, where incense
and candles and bamboo try
to inhabit the three rooms,
where she can be seen
by the sad paintings of one
who might become a lover.
The place could be the model
shown to other new singles.
This is the place where
Buddha on the stovetop
receives the steam
from the single woman’s
teakettle, but inside
the cupboards? one plate,
Folger’s crystals, one bowl,
two plastic bags. One spoon.
This is the pre-cat stage,
when everyone tells her
to take care of herself and
she complies with cocoa butter
body wash and Badger
balm, a calming sleep enhancer.
I could tell her to buy the dishes
and the pans, to acquire the vacuum
cleaner and the spices, but
the cleaning products, the towels
of real life cannot be rushed, for
she could still change her mind
or he might call — that’s not
what I meant — one deprived
night. At night she keeps the phone
off against that call or its
absence. In her bathroom
is a new package of aromatherapy
Dead Sea mineral bath salts called
Awakening. The refrigerator chills
nothing but two brown eggs
and a cut lemon but when I look
in the freezer, and so help me
I do look, I find it full
of meat, two dozen cuts
in white butcher paper, beef
for stew, beef tip steak,
beef rump roast. Meaning
what? One day she might again
be hungry? She will by god give
herself sustenance? Perhaps she
will make someone a good
rich stew? Or what? Her bed
is heavy with pillows and
layers of comforters. I could
tell her this is a trembling
tender stage, one day
she won’t live here, and
she will almost miss it.

In an essential way, home is childhood. It’s a time as well as a place. Here’s a poem about the games I played as a child:

PLAY
It was always baby
dolls, we made them
say gubbity gubbity,
that was their language.
We played pick
from catalogs, only
one choice each per page,
this is my bathroom faucet,
this is my dish pattern,
these are my husband’s
pajamas, this is my husband’s
lawn mower, this his body.
I made myself lost
in cornfields. I made
a raft out of pickets,
sailed two yards into
the paper mill sludge pond,
and sank among the cattails.
We played board games in
Kay Marshall’s father’s bomb
shelter, how new and strange
they were underground.
In the summer I sneaked
out at night. Tiger
Powell’s brother made us
play crack the whip on
the ice rink my dad created,
daytime shoveling the bank,
nights out with the hose
watering and watering
the snowy lawn. I flew off
the whip and at night cried
but my mother said you’re
all right, and the next week I
flew off the whip again but
this time she had to take my
bent bone to the doctor whose
x-rays revealed two broken
arms, but I never said to her
See. I took everyone
to the old factory, its broken
glass and filth, and made
a mystery so I could be the girl
detective who figured it
out when all were baffled in
the dark and the danger. And
thus we make and thus we lose
the strange languages of our lives.

 My father is 87, and he wants me to help him sort the old photographs, slides, and 8-millimeter films. We came across an old photo he had taken of my mother hanging out diapers in the backyard. It’s the kind of intimate photo you see in family albums, and it’s all about home. It made me wonder — why do men like to take pictures of their wives with wet laundry?

WOMEN HANGING OUT WASH
I don’t know why men
photograph them — my mother
in the back yard on Stoughton Street, body
post-partum sweet, stylish hair bobby-pinned

back, reaching the twins’ diapers two-by-two
all the way past the grapevine to the barn,
the firstborn in an actual pinafore handing
up clothespins — later me in short shorts, white

cheeks peeking out, pinning up jeans, his
jockey shorts, red quilt, laughing at him taking
this old shot, later his mother rehanging the towels.
Why do they take us in the grassy yard

with the stiff, uninhabited clothes, why this
joy as we reach to the gray clothesline?
In these backyards all is ripe, to the heart,
and they are the men behind all this milk.

One day, alone in one of those nine apartments in which I’ve lived, it seemed as if every time I looked out a window, there were birds staring at me — as if they wanted something from me.

BIRDS WATCH ME
Three sparrows on the kitchen sill
stare at the fork transporting beans
to my mouth. They could be gleaning
the shucks from the red-gray cardinal’s
testy jabs at the seed bell. But they watch
me with their yellow beaks open.

Then before my desk a cactus wren
pokes its long beak at the screen,
and we see each other
at work. I pick at my words,
and the bird presents its white-slashed
profile, eyeing the husks.

Don’t watch me. I know nothing,
and instinct rattles in me like dried
seeds. You, quail, does that tipped
plume dowse love for you? And dove —
the courting arc and glide after mourning,
does that work to feed you?

What happens when love and home are lost? Things get dramatic. Here’s my dark-night-of-the-soul poem.

CAUSE OR SOURCE OF PAIN
 “. . . and the cactuses sharpen the edges
of their daggers so that the wind may feel
pain as it passes.”
—  “Tata Casehua” by Miguel Méndez

Yes, and the moon scythes
the drape that it may know
it is torn, and the night sky
sutures itself that the tin
stars may make their cuts.

My students present poems
in their own languages, tongues
unbound. The Pakistani’s eyes
close when he recites, and we loft
into, who knows quite what, a moon
enchanted, lovers severed. The class
claps but I ask for a translation.
He shrugs. This guy used to love
a girl and now he can’t sleep at night.

A lover knows how the skin softens
so the lover, that other, will feel
pain at every complicated stroke —
but not how it softens too for self,
as the wind whets the daggers’ edges.

In the motel jacuzzi I try
in my hot pink suit for baptism
or anointment or drowning or
anything, a woman used
to love a man, but when I emerge
the watchers behind the steamed glass
holding their coffee and buttered toast
are open-eyed. Goodbye
ritual, goodbye sleep.

It wasn’t a matter of efficiency,
the gassing. Shooting and clubbing
and torching caused too much pain
to the killers. Ashes scorched only
the sky, the low German sky.
But now, but at last when that clotted
sky takes them, ashes have prepared it:
a chamber where ashes shall burn again.

Yes, and dorsal fins notch
the sea that it may know
it is torn, and the deep
licks itself that the corals —
staghorn, pencil, green cactus — may
make their phosphorescent cuts.

In my Roget’s are listings for pain,
for capability of giving pain, cause
or source of pain — but Plath wrote
her pain when she gave up
her thesaurus, and who among poets
can sever the pains — the thorn
from the air, the wood from
the flesh, the water from the bone?

It is the longest night of the year.
A lover used to love and now
cannot sleep in the cut night,
and sharpens the cuts that the love
may feel the love as it passes.

Sometimes “home” is found by going away, and I think I travel just to miss home.

RECONCILIATION
We meet in this foreign cafe outside
in the foreign spring where dun birds
hum and unknown trees, thin
and purple-sheathed, drip blossoms. We
point to items on the menu, understand
nothing. Believe me, this is not France, no
island, nowhere in the southern hemisphere.
We are shy. Do you like this? — tasting
hot green filling rolled in what is not tortilla
or chapati. We clink smoky glasses. Here’s to
what? Who followed whom
to this land? out of our homeland
where politics are usual and our blue dishes

are quiescent in the cupboard. Customs
fall away. On the temples here the graven
animals have gray wings. Who runs
this place? What is the music? What of
tears? What do the denizens want?
In the homeland the entire past is frozen. We
cannot go there. Remote ruins, carved
with the ninety-nine names
for blame, crumble. Here they have tender
pronouns: him, her. What is wild here,
what cultivated? here at the ends of the earth?
where the word for yesterday is gray wing
and today is sweet wing, tomorrow is wing.

I was writer-in-residence at Victoria University in Australia a little while back, and I also got in some good tourist time, too. On an island near Melbourne, every evening at dusk the “Little Penguins,” 13-inchers, hundreds of them, come out of the ocean and gather in groups sufficiently brave to cross the beach and make their way to their borrows. They’re vulnerable to predators from ground and air, so they wait until dark and even then, it’s safety in numbers. (They used to be called “fairy penguins” but were renamed “Little Penguins” out of some notion of political correctness.) Anyway, those fairy penguins made me miss my husband and home.

PENGUIN PARADE
The fairy penguins emerge from the ocean,
their natural habitat in which, explain the guides,
they are assured and graceful. The black

clouds roll beneath the full gold moon — high
drama — and I cannot see the dark blue
and white birds slick in the blue water. I think

of how to describe for you their sudden presence
on the shore. They do not know humans
have named their beach Summerland. They

wait to gather against predators, isn’t that
always the way, and begin the safety-in-numbers
waddle across the beach to their home burrows

with their mates. It’s a fifty percent mate-for-life
rate, a guide says: if she fails to produce,
he moves on. The couples on the viewing

platform elbow each other. The fairy penguins
do not know they are more acceptable for being
renamed Little Penguins. Consider the cost

of redoing all the tourist brochures. In my new
hot pink scarf and striped gloves I am warm,
but I want you on the platform beside me.

The birds do look awkward, that’s the repeated
word, as they waddle. Who says the real story
is the transition from sea to burrow? Consider

the cost of our missing. No photos allowed —
the flash scares the birds, is the excuse. No doubt
correct. But humans must trick humans to sit

and simply see. The birds are not “graceful”
in the ocean nor “awkward” on the land. Neither
do they parade. Sea by day, beach by dusk,

dune burrow by night: we humans should
let their blue and white truth be ours. And I do,
except for this poem, except for your absence, I do.

The last poem is about the birth of my first granddaughter, at the time of a vast forest fire in the Catalina Mountains, near Tucson. When my son was a college student and we were up in the Catalinas one day, I took a picture of him sitting on a rock above a pool of water. And when I got it developed, I was amazed. He was all washed out, gray and brown, but his reflection in the water was bright and clear. Very strange.

ASPEN FIRE
For Mia Naomi, 8/8/03

In the summer of 2003, the Aspen Fire burned nearly 85,000 acres on Mount Lemmon in the Santa Catalina Mountains.

“Then God said to Noah. . . ‘This is the sign of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all the future generations: I set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth.”

From town, the Catalinas remain,
their cut into my sky. No one is
allowed up there yet, but the ruin
is revealed in newsprint black against
memory’s forest. The burn should show:
We have known (if not believed) that truth
will out. That a mountain must be more
than its familiar rise from the plain.
That consequences make a lurid
cut.

Once on Mount Lemmon: What I saw:
my young man son posed on a rock, all
the hot forest around him and him
caught within, gazing into a dim
pool. What the camera saw: a dusty
boy camouflaged on a gray boulder
backed by brown pines and pale sky — below
a bright blue pool, fringed with bright green leaves,
and in the reflection his jacket
is golden, and his hair, and his face
looks out of the blue. This water is
the doorway to a world where the known
world is drab.

Two nights before, I dream
my son in the bedroom chair holding
a crying daughter. And so I am
right. On her birth day — though she is far
north — below the pure shape of the burned
mountain, the monsoon frees a rainbow
that catches the ghost moon and strikes just
beyond us in the desert. I ask
how it feels to hold his child, and he
says — familiar. On the fifth day I
am holding her, my tears don’t wake her:
it is suddenly impossible,
all of it, biology, the whole
story. She’s feisty when she’s awake,
my son says. Just wait till you see her
angry.

We need new words for her. Don’t
write about dead dogs or new babies,
I tell my students. Or for god’s sake
rainbows. It’s all been said by better
than you, also by worse. For the fourth
generation that I know of, this
little baby toe hooks under. Now
I know, my son says when I show him,
that she’s mine.

Within every image
is the truth. Her father is the bright
boy in the pool now boiled away. She
is more than my dream of her, flesh, and
memory, as familiar as but no
more familiar than the promise
to do, or not to do. I give up
the logic of flood and fire for
that rainbow’s covenant: that the known
and the scrimmed worlds wake to each other
in flesh. What remains beyond burning.

At last, home is place, and home is family. . . and home is what endures no matter what

Homing in on a Poem

“Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,” a Philip Larkin poem begins. Two of the saddest poems I know are haiku about lost homes:

IN EXILE
In my old home, still
my parents live. — The insect-cries
are shrill. . . .

Anonymous (Early 18th Century)

CHERRY-BLOSSOM TIME
In my old home
which I forsook, the cherries
are in bloom.

Issa (1762-1826)

Exercise
Here’s an exercise that will lead to the drafting of an intense — not necessarily sad — poem:

There is a lost home where you cannot go. Write it down. Then follow these steps — in writing, of course, with specific details. Take at least five minutes for each question.

1. What do you remember about the lost home?

2. What don’t you remember about it?

3. Why can’t you go there?

4. What do you imagine is happening there now?

These detailed notes are the raw material of a poem. Here’s a way to move it forward:

1. Underline the specific details and the images in the notes.

2. Underline the words and phrases that surprise you — unusual words, perhaps, or ordinary words used in an unexpected way; details you didn’t know you remembered; new connections and insights.

3. Because abstractions and generalizations can lead to sentimentality in a poem, put brackets around any outright statements about feelings and any explanations.

4. From the details and surprises you underlined in the notes, draft the poem about your lost home.

****

When you’ve honed your draft to a finished poem, send it to Meg via Writing It Real at mailto:info@writingitreal.com. She’ll collect the poems and share them in a second article, along with some observations — about homes and poems.