I went to hear poet
Michelle Boisseau read tonight with some of the wonderful people from my poetry class, and I was moved by her meditations on borders, boundaries, and state lines. I started thinking about my own home, and the borders I've crossed since leaving there. I grew up at the tip top of Mississippi, in a town that's no more Mississippi than it is Tennessee or Arkansas. Five miles north is Memphis, ten miles west is the Mississippi River, Arkansas just across the bridge. The funny thing about Arkansas, though, is I never went there until I was 18-years-old, when I moved smack dab to the middle for college. I remember that first semester. The weather seemed much colder there than at home, and I didn't have a coat. My daddy had to send me money so I could buy one. I saw my first real mountain that year, when I went up to Fayetteville with the Young Democrats for something or another. The bluffs overlooking Highway 61 were the tallest things I'd seen until then.
I want to write an Arkansas poem, but I'm scared what it will show me. I discovered lots of things there--cheap beer, Ani DiFranco, liberal politics--and even more about myself. It wasn't until I moved here, to Knoxville, that I realized what a pro I am at repressing. At giving a little, then pulling back and wishing to God I hadn't.
Let's just leave it at this: I think of that place fondly, and I miss it sometimes, when I'm driving home from school and I see a changing leaf. Arkansas in autumn could be my favorite place. I carry the landscape deep inside somewhere, in the sinews between muscle and bone.
2 comments:
Beautifully said. I've noticed we tend to think of place as the people and architecture of our everyday...until we leave it. Only when we go away for a bit do we notice the geography we carried under the skin all along.
Think of moving around as collecting internal landscape. You know, like you collected rocks when you were a kid.
By the way, the Nosferatu poetry reading at the jumbotron finally happened last night. No rain.
Tim said: "I want to write an Arkansas poem, but I'm scared what it will show me."
Then that is what you *should* write. Always write what makes you uncomfortable. Just don't show anyone. *wink* At least not until you have worked through it.
You know that. Probably better than I do. (I say that because you can at admit what you are avoiding writing about...).
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