Greetings, @d-pend.
I'm guessing these images are from Texas, where you lived before you went to NC and where you have returned after that interim.
I was commenting to @zeleiracordero how these images and some of the lines reminded me of my visits to my hometown, after having left for many years, after so many things have changed and had been forgotten, especially people and their stories.
I sense nostalgia (from childhood, maybe adolescence) highlighted by a first love, maybe. For me those are the most precious memories of our hometowns. The fleeting moments of pedestrian nooks that became temple, refuge, battlefields even. Some of those places remained unchanged, others changed so much we can’t even remember what they looked like.
One of my greatest regrets is not having taken pictures of places that meant a lot me as I was growing up and that were transformed in time, mostly for worse, and it hurts me not to be able to reconstruct most of the memories.
So, in this poem I see this sort of liberating love experience, a childish one, but with the intensity and conflict of a Romeo and Juliet affair. One of the two is uprooted (tamed?)
At this point I was also thinking about the imposing figures of the trees in the picture. Majestically victorious. How many obstacles did they fight to get that high? How satisfactorily it must feel to see their surroundings from above, to provide different kinds of nooks for those looking for shelter! How much of that sap flows through us?
This particular stanza gave me the chills
O fleeting moments, closer fades
of fate with timelessness in glades.
Nothing said and nothing gained
in figures lost of times entrained
I actually had a glade in the middle of a selvatic lot in front of my house. I would hide with my friends, play cowboys and Indians or explorers. As time past our forest became a square and my friends became perfect strangers.
The love of my childhood will always have a special place in my mind and will always infuse those changed spaces of an aura of purity and transcendence beyond the mundane wars and truces, beyond the transgressions and disloyalties. No stains remain.
In des'late trails of gridbuilt looks
our love is laved—pedestrin nooks
Hi, @hlezama! Thanks as always for your thorough read.
Correct :-)
I always experience a strong feeling of disorientation returning to my hometown, especially because I grew up in the same house my whole youth. So much has changed, yes—most of all, from the cruel horseblinding effect of ego, myself. How much did I really see around me, anyway? Where is the solidity of the past's template that I could sense the deviations? Then we have the turning of the seasons and the procession of the Earth through space. What can remain? Nothing feels familiar, and the sense that it should makes it all the more unsettling.
I tend towards a somewhat solitary existence, for the last several years. My only intimate relationship occurred during adolescence's formative period and extended a bit into my college years. You might predict, given such circumstances, that years would erode the monuments of memory we built very slowly. You might also not be so surprised that such an experience would continue to serve as an archetype for realities and idealities of romantic love. I am supremely thankful to have had such an experience, because it has provided endless fodder for creativity. I'm not sure I would make much of a poet, had the experience of heartbreak not driven me to seek the solace of some form of personospiritual faculty through which I could transmute and make sense of what had occurred.
Again, I am astounded and almost frightened by your ability to intuit what is behind a poem. Many times writing I am in a sort of reverie. I think of nothing but channel sound, cadence, and feeling. It's a meditation which is easily spoilt by over-efforting on my part. So, when I meet a perceptive spirit like you, I have the honor of meeting my poem more completely.
Wow. That reminds me that when my parents came to my hometown, they were the first house in the block. Beyond their fence was fields until the creek some distance from our house, and coyotes would come up from there to howl. Now, you have to search to find nature. It is all concrete.
That's beautiful. I have a similar experience :-) Again, you managed to discern perfectly the feeling behind the phrase "our love is laved." You know, it's nice to know that if I'm ever confused about my poetry, I can ask Sifu Henry Lezama to explain it to me. xD
Hahaha. I'm flattered by your comment.
It is always a delight to dig into your work. I do it with all the passion and enthusiasm I can summon amid so much crap I have around.
It has been escapism of sorts. It does me good to image a time when I can give myself to literature in all its possibilities and devote creative energy to elevated visions without the barbwire of mundanity and political polution anchoring me to the underground.
I sincerely admire your talent, your vision of the world, your capacity to estrange yourself and your material from the simplicity of the cotidian, and yet keep, with the zeal of a parent trying to protect their offspring, the simple gifts that make us human and good safely stored under the dome of poetry.
@hlezama,
Hey H.
As usual, brilliant commentary.
It's funny, I feel the same way when I visit my childhood home.
Logically, we know that the world has moved on and that "there" will have changed, just like everywhere else. And yet, we want it to have remained the same, the way we remember it. A bubble untouched by Time.
Childhood, and its memories, exercises a powerful influence for the rest of one's life.
Quill