LJIdol / LPF: Week 11: Long Distance Dedication

[codenamewanderlust]

There’s a portal to Puerto Rico 

by the back door 

my Tío tells me 

 

And I understand

 

If you stand just so 

while it is raining 

he says, 

leaning against the open metal grate 

 

The door-frame becomes the inbetween 

Between here and there

 

I don’t tell him about the portal to Faerie
under the wash-line and how I keep loosing clothes pins

 

Instead,

I have been drifting 

I tell him 

and I know he understands

 

Even though he has been getting lost

somewhere between taking flight 

and making plans

 

He knows I've dedicated my life 

to pure adventure for a long time

I am someplace always 

Inbetween

  

Time is currency 

That I invest in experience 

 

And I have little to spare 

and too much to die for

 

Giving meaning to the passage of years

Those magical numbers:

2019, 2012, 1999…

The Autumn of 2011 

seems like a lifetime ago
Tramping the streets of New Orleans 

 

Decades now 

of standing in open doorways

 

Of planting port-keys 

among the memories 

The accumulation of possessions 

and possessions 

and possessions

As if by some means to anchor myself

to some moment in time and space

  

Flipping through the bookcase of memory 

Like Matthew McConaughey

On the interstellar highway

  

The fluorescent thrum of the incarnate motorway

transports me beyond the boundaries of time
 

Without leaving my bed

 

Comments

[passing_through24]

This was beautiful. I was particularly touched by this part:

The accumulation of possessions
and possessions
and possessions

As if by some means to anchor myself
to some moment in time and space

I too am a keeper of possessions. I have a house full of furniture and pictures that I inherited from my grandparents after they passed away that reminds me of them and my childhood every time I look at them. I have a box of old postcards tucked away in my closet that my grandmother sent to her sister that simply bears her name and the word "town" as the address. I have two glass vases in my girl's bathroom that I bought at Goodwill when I redid their bathroom when they were juniors in high school. I still have (somewhere in my house) the old Raggedy Anne book my mom used to read to me. Almost everything I have now has a special meaning to me and I've rid my house of those things that don't.

We should all have a Tio as wonderful and magical as the one in this poem.