I tried to write about Eureka for the first time in 2015. I wrote a proposal for a fellowship, but gave up when I realized the application wanted a budget. How do you come up with a number for a thing like that? Money for a stack of poems about a blip among blips on a map of West Virginia? Not happening.
I tried to guess recently, based on the number of houses still standing, how many people live there now. 10 or 11, I decided. There were twice as many when I was growing up there, more even when my dad was a kid. I won’t guess what it was like when my grandpa was young in the house that would eventually be my childhood home.
I wasn’t sure how I’d write The River on Our Hands when I sat down to revise that decade-old fellowship proposal to submit to Pulley Press. I didn’t think anyone would ever want to read it. I didn’t think I’d want to read it once it was written. I was frustrated following a week at Oak Ledge in Kentucky, where I failed to make any real progress on an entirely different project and was pretty lost on what to do next. Then I remembered the proposal, then Pulley said yes, then I drove past my childhood home and saw an excavator parked in what had once been our wood-paneled living room.
Then came “Chalk Lines,” first published in Apartment Poetry.
Excavator a rough god climbs,
falters, and the rafters lose
their resolve. An erasure,
a fresh vault—
the nursery’s ruined wallpaper,
its judgmental ponies cold
and snorting in the hollowed
shell of the cellar.
Childhood unlearns order:
unruly lick of stairs, fractured
cinderblock jaw. Childhood
slouching in the hall light.
Now I could swallow
the mess, could lob
a smooth stone through
the shining kitchen window.
Now the jaundiced sign upriver:
best deals on Icehouse 30-packs
in town; now the excavator
tarnished on the lawn.
I remember the garden
hemmed in railroad ties,
the nail stomped into
my tender heel—
each year shakes the scar
loose; each year lightens
the bruise.
That was that, I guess.