Re-Inventing Yourself
March 16 2008


A warm dry place.
Or heartbreak, and infatuation.
Or an elderly mom, ailing
alone.
The transience of place;
relocating,
for love
or money.

You pack your life into a small sedan,
back-seat loaded
duffel bags lashed on top.
It feels like an ancient bus in some 3rd world country
chugging through dust and bugs,
folks grinning, scolding,
hanging-on
spilling-out.

Perhaps a new promotion
a lover’s quarrel
a rent you can’t afford.
Or perhaps escape,
someplace new
you try to re-invent yourself.
You could drive due south,
fleeing hard starts and frozen-over.
You could follow the sun, heading west,
where all the seekers and dreamers went.
Or you could travel north, instead,
on wash-board roads with gravel shoulders
up past the timberline.

Where all summer, the light seeks you out,
dimming at night
but never darkness.
It pries in, between the blinds.
It keeps you tossing from side-to-side.
And it glares at you, in bleary-eyed mornings
relentless days,
stripping you naked
exposed.
You long for the restfulness of winter
— how the darkness conceals, keeping your secrets;
how the world contracts
holding you close.

So what if you’d gone west, instead;
run-up against the ocean,
run out of land?
An entire continent, and still you feel claustrophobic,
when there’s nowhere else to go.