at the silkscreen cinema

photograph via time tales

no, the human heart

is unknowable.

but in my birthplace

the flowers still smell

the same as always.
-tsurayuki

i moved halfway across the country, this continent,

(we are wild and expansive, distance is a geological formation)

last week and spent the end of summer with my family in the countryside

just north of kingston, ontario.

i have been reading novels & non-fiction, already more

grounded and focused. summer-finished, september-ready. 

is this how it feels to miss the atlantic?

who wouldn't like to wake up on the isle of innisfree
to muck about that bee-loud glade like he?

there is a great deal of goodness here. i am searching for

words adequate to the beauty of a place so much

like home. i had forgotten the feeling of family,

i had forgotten the heady afternoons in sunlit orchards, 

fish in the water, stillness in the lake.

two nights ago, my father and i made applesauce

(pink like the inside of seashells) and later, above the barn,

a harvest moon lit up the landlubbing sky like an ocean.

you're never far away from me
i've had this lock of your hair now for a half a century or more
i keep it in a matchbox in the pocket of my coat.

-christine fellows