January 11, 2008

I will, as things appear at this point, drive to Akron on Thursday or Friday, drive home on Saturday, bearing with me the things that dad wants that won’t fit in his van, and the few things I might want myself. I regret all this is going so fast, but perhaps that is for the better. Less lingering. No time for nostalgia to sicken. It’s hurtful for me to think of my father leaving that house, though. I am not ready, even if he is. I thought maybe he would leave it and my sister and I would sell it later and have some time to say goodbye, but none of that is going to happen. It is a characterless aluminum rectangle, true, but I tried so hard to give it some spirit out of my spirit that something of me must be alive in it somewhere. The last memories of mother. The night I wrote my first poem. The nights I would lie awake in my bed, believing that God, or at least some angel, was my lover. Bimbo running to me out of the forest, wagging himself in joy. The woods beyond, which once were all the wild world. Sexual awakening in the white afternoon light. What will I miss most? The basswood tree in the side yard, that I planted myself, fighting father for a while for its life, until he saw the beauty of its blossoms in spring. The thought of this is bitter sorrow. There is no remedy for it. I will work it out of my system.

My father at 88 is willing to close the door behind him and move on. I was never good at that. I am my mother’s child in that.

Part of my fixation with Ireland is the attempt to build for myself a past. What experiences my ancestors might have had there I couldn’t know. Misery, maybe. But I willed to build something else, something magical and rooted in the land deep as the land goes. The same with Foxboro Avenue. It was half my childhood, and I can’t let it be nothing. What a suburban waste, to any observer, how lacking in depth of any kind. But I tried to build there. I was willing to make all the magic up. That is over, and it is for the best. Its being for the best does not keep me from bending over and keening like a Connemara crone.