So, my artist and musician friend Curtis Settino just had an exhibition of a sculpting project he’s been working on for a number of years. His sculptures are these mostly fantastical creatures, some standing just six or seven inches off the ground, others four or five feet tall, all representing the action or theme of being “on the move,” hence, the title of his exhibit. At any rate, for his exhibition opening, he invited a number of his writer friends to do a reading of pieces written about migration, forced or voluntary movement, generally, any experience, first-hand or observed, of a transitory or transitional nature. A number of poets came together to read and I was lucky to be invited.
Here’s a prose poem that I lifted and then revised for the occasion from a song lyric I wrote a number of years ago, after my wife and I and our toddler son, given pretty radical economic changes, were “forced” to move out of our home of 20 years and head about 15 minutes south where real estate was nearly half the price. It was a good, smart move–but it was a difficult one emotionally.
1434–Behind
We put in gray carpet, whitewashed everything, and that was dumb. We built a fence—we did a shitty job. That was the second thing we did. And then we remodeled the bathroom. That turned out pretty good. Carpet in the basement for the studio. That was all right. That was all right. We put in a lawn in the back yard and it was really nice. We did our best to leave something good behind.
When we had money, we hired someone to rebuild the fence (correctly) and put in a deck. We put in French doors and a new floor. We remodeled the kitchen and finished the basement. We did what we could to leave something good behind.
That’s not the whole story of 1434 but a large part of it. I was the last person to leave the house with that last small load of odds and ends. I said goodbye out loud to every room and I cried as I drove away, excited about the new home, sure, but feeling that we had left maybe too much good (as much as we could) behind.
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And here’s the song version. You’ll notice that, outside of a few other embellishments, “We did our best” turns into “we did what we could” in the revision, mostly because I liked the internal rhyme between “could” and “good.” And also, that third stanza, which I think kind of completes the poem, was not in the original lyric at all. Enjoy:
michael jarmer 