This move from Buffalo to Atlanta
has my father’s imprint on it. Odd you
might say, considering he’s been dead for decades, yet he’s been appearing in
my dreams since before I left for Atlanta in August. Yang energy could be
enough of an explanation for making this move.
What does it take to uproot oneself?
An upheaval of sorts, a burning dissatisfaction, or the perpetual longing
for something more? In my case, it wasn’t
the upheaval but the sense I had to escape a kind of rust belt poverty and that
time was running out for finding a good job.
Back to the dreams which seemed to
be foreshadowing this change. My father appeared in all the standard dreams of
home, the childhood home where I lived for the first 17 years of my life and which
still is the only place that bears the archetype of home. In those dreams death is always a factor,
usually my mother’s. She is sick, we
call an ambulance, or we weep at what has already occurred. The house stands in one of its many forms,
sometimes bigger or shabbier than I remember but always an important
protagonist. In one dream I came upon
vomit in a room- the symbol of which I’m still trying to figure out.
Then, in one dream, he flat out
asked me why didn’t you have children?
My response was, aren’t my stories and poems enough? Perhaps it’s a genetic question and in that
case I have no answer or a million. Years
ago a Peruvian shaman I met told me I had a genetic make-up that was rarely
seen and I carried more of my father than my mother. One thing I know is I inherited his love of wanderlust.
Here’s a poem from my first
chapbook:
Finding My Way Home
The Hmong bury
placenta,
close to home.
Danger rises in
direct proportion
to their
distance from it.
The Navajo began
the long march
home
where each tree,
each stream
tells the past.
The spot that
fixes me
to the ground,
floats.
Lost in the
birches
and pines of the
Baltic,
following the storks south,
to nest in the
bell towers
of Castillian
churches,
I´m finding my
way home.
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