These moist lands, haze with forgetfulness. Daytime is like dusk, everyday slumbering grey with someone’s immediate drunkenness towards abandon. Where is my father? This is not his land. He was baked in his brown and dusty home of Okalahoma. His people cleared dried and caked sorrow from their mouths, to utter powerful and mysterious words that would release them from their captivity.
No, this must be my mother’s land, more like it, emerald isles, where, too, they drink to die, for a while. Is this the place I belong, on her side?
Port, land too lush with life, the seizing of a young man’s ideas. Me caught in a battle between the ocean and mountain. This is the land where the living come to be buried in a grey season for a thorough war of dreariness.
---
Portland, you green, lush whore, something to be recognized in my own bed! Quit me, or I you, before I take the living to my father’s land.
Thursday, December 22, 2005
Places In Which I Dream
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9 comments:
This is thick like fog off the Missouri river in some areas north. . . the struggle to see and to breathe and to release the sense of imprisonment:the struggle between circumstance and choice. Odysseus seeks home ultimately and I hope you find your peace. This is epic if I haven't said that already.
chantthis,
I don't know about epic, but thank you for that kindness. I would love there to be an epic quality about my writing, but I think I need to write a lot more before that happens. I like that you recognize "...the struggle to breathe and to release the sense of imprisonement." I wanted to capture place, and the loss of identity in place, perhaps captivity. I felt i needed to express how Portland brings me to confront environment--perhaps my new theme, for now atleast.
Environment is your new theme? Yes, makes sense you from what you have written these past three posts.
I think home is something you make, where ever you choose or happen to be. Home can seem to be a person, or a place, but mostly home is an attitude, either resigned acceptance, chosen residency, or forced inhabitance. You either loathe it, like it, love it or are indifferent, with varying degrees, but it is in the mind, home is.
Home lives in my mind. My mind can be content where ever, if it has the mind to be.
“Where they drink to die, for a while.” I’ve never read/heard it put that way. Death as release, surly, drink to be released from this life, for a while. I like the stunning reality in that.
Okay, I’m having trouble with the last bit, are you threatening to leave Portland? Gaaaa, I am embarrassed by my thickness here, but it’s more important to understand than to pretend that I do, so fill me in….
Missed ya!
Oh, hell, I take some of that back, I'd sooner live in a Mennonite community than live in Kansas City again. But that’s just me. So, yah my mind would have a difficult time living in KC. Okay, it matters, geography matters.
FA,
Very perceptive. I guess I was kinda thrreatenng to leave Portland, but then again I want to give it a thorough going over first.
That's kinda sensual...
and I am the queen of understatement.
Lane,
So good to find you again. I didn't realize I had corrupted my link and thought for a while that you had gone offline.
What fabulous thinking words you are writing about Portland. I hear your struggle with the culture shock of the new environment and at the same time miss know that you are not here--despite the fact that for me there should be no difference, other than I know you're not.
How strange to find since I left that you have moved from those characters you were descrbing here to the place without people I just read. My heart hopes your stuggle is with the place and not with loneliness.
Miss you,
Liz
Checking in and saying hi.
It's been awhile.
Still wondering about the move.
Sounds like it's been an adjustment.
You'll have to tell me your theatre scene take on Chicago some time.
*Always got my fingers crossed for you. Let me know how it's going.
excellent ode
portland should be
proud to have you
as its son
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