Boondocks
Here in Denver again after a prolonged while away. In Minnesota I thought after trying to lend substance to some fugitive memories, trying to hunt for branches with my initials carved boldy in youth, for my name falling out in casual conversations among friends I once held dear. I sat in the car & looked over the Commons, where I spent so many hours as a teenager, where the passage of time seemed an abstraction, then, hardly worth contemplating. In remembrance, I feel still the kiss of the breeze, the smell of tobacco mingled with fresh-cut grass, the chthonic heft of wet lichen on the rocks at the shore. The bark's thick sinews on the bough overhanging the water. The fine sand cold under my feet in the autumn. & that attending spirit of youth, laid bare in its gaping, honest simplicity.
I looked for myself in these places, auguring, divining, as if they would speak, lend me substance, reify these strange & changeling songs in my heart. I found nothing. I found places with names, filled with people that I did not know.
There was a truckstop where my brother & I used to stop every time we drove between Des Moines & Minneapolis called Boondocks. Every time, we played a game of chess at the little worn picnic table by the rust-red miniature oil drill & the green fire hydrant labeled for use by "city dogs." As we approached it this time, coming south, I had every intention of stopping. I thought, without thinking, that perhaps it, too, could tell me a story that would sound familiar, a tale in which the characters spoke in recognizable cadence, in which their features would resembled my own. I drove past the exit in tears. What can a place tell you about yourself? As if we deposit ourselves, invest our identities so forcefully upon our environments that they are coined anew, baring the mark of our having-been. As if a truckstop could spell my name, a blade of grass call after me.
We linger where we have been, but we leave no ghost, not while we live. As we are, we are the nearest semblance of completion we can hope to know. I can't tell you what I hoped to find in those natural talismen of my past, but every one of them became a mirror unto my present. Yesterday cannot so neatly rhyme with this moment, as it unfolds & unfolds, a still point leaving a wide wake reft in its backwater that roils & tumbles until it quiets into a hush & pacific sheen.
I looked for myself in these places, auguring, divining, as if they would speak, lend me substance, reify these strange & changeling songs in my heart. I found nothing. I found places with names, filled with people that I did not know.
There was a truckstop where my brother & I used to stop every time we drove between Des Moines & Minneapolis called Boondocks. Every time, we played a game of chess at the little worn picnic table by the rust-red miniature oil drill & the green fire hydrant labeled for use by "city dogs." As we approached it this time, coming south, I had every intention of stopping. I thought, without thinking, that perhaps it, too, could tell me a story that would sound familiar, a tale in which the characters spoke in recognizable cadence, in which their features would resembled my own. I drove past the exit in tears. What can a place tell you about yourself? As if we deposit ourselves, invest our identities so forcefully upon our environments that they are coined anew, baring the mark of our having-been. As if a truckstop could spell my name, a blade of grass call after me.
We linger where we have been, but we leave no ghost, not while we live. As we are, we are the nearest semblance of completion we can hope to know. I can't tell you what I hoped to find in those natural talismen of my past, but every one of them became a mirror unto my present. Yesterday cannot so neatly rhyme with this moment, as it unfolds & unfolds, a still point leaving a wide wake reft in its backwater that roils & tumbles until it quiets into a hush & pacific sheen.
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