Toward an Origin Story
A poem and its reading
Today, I’ll read you a poem, this from Calling It Back to Me, a chapbook I brought out in the summer, which you can learn more about and order here. You’ll find the poem below (and know that it’s still growing, it’s ongoing, that this here is a snapshot).
Hope you enjoy, and happy Groundhog Day. This year, I’m rooting for winter.
Toward an Origin Story Under Russia’s boot, under England’s boot, they set off running to become the boot of the plains, stamping out the grasses and trees— and now investment companies bulldoze the windbreaks, fill in the sloughs, flatten hills and houses, seed ditches, every arable, pilfered inch— the settlement story going sour in the heat and the haze. I repeat a tight-lipped past—repeat what? repeat Why do you want to know? repeat place names misremembered? (and “Russia”? “England”?) repeat 160 acres as Andjelic rounds a quarter-million? the ever-shrinking parcels that drove us onto the ships? With means enough to carry ourselves over with toddlers, tools, letters recommending us, relatives to catch us, name and relation, what will you do here, farmhand or domestic? With means enough, but only in concert, or after some years, or after inheritance, to put up the fee for the plot, plough it up, dig trees out of it, plant gardens, wander off it seeking work each winter, try to keep progeny alive on what remains? How can I speak for this? For pride is what blooms and what we must today contend with, bringing to bear the sloughs have been dry for some years now, the soil long spent, that nearly all of us fled to the cities, and the addiction to booze that threads through the families, prized equipment that ate up all those fingers, or worse, the progeny who didn’t survive and are buried there in plots untended, all the daily pain elided by their beneficiaries, relieved simply to have survived, to have been thrown clear. What’s said is brief by design. An echo surrounds it and everything else besides. Ship of opportunity, they say. Ship of labour without being mastered, they say. Money not necessary and riches profuse, the trees, the soil, the water waiting here for you. It seems, on the face, so hard to imagine their leaving, the parting scene, who was there, what they did or didn’t say. Yet here I am so far from home— so far from the city nearest where they bought and settled and left—living their inheritance, my own parting story still unspoken, hooking my strings between points on the globe, expecting answers.
