“homesickness that guides the lovers
from somewhere they had loved before
they knew they loved it to somewhere
they had loved before they saw it”
-W.S. Merwin, “Variation on a Theme”
What is the line
between homesickness and lovesickness
when we’re homesick for other people’s lives,
when we hunger for the places in their stories,
feel the throb in our fingers that reach
for the particular dirt or over-ripe fruit that’s stained their hands
or the particular wood of the bar where they once passed
blue nights, blue notes, red hours, long successions
of a particular tequila like an infantry march,
and the way it steadied or gave under their elbows,
or the pillow that might smell like the top of their head
did as a child, the dust and spice of them woven into cotten,
feel the sting in our eyes as we scan
around us desperately for the view they had
at their most lonely, and were in that loneliness
entirely themselves,
as if our home is in each other,
in the particulars of someone
whose coordinates and artifacts
feel like a place we left long ago
without bothering to mark it on a map
or take any pictures for a slideshow or photo album,
a place that starts out feeling like an emptiness
from before we can remember
that pulsates through the core of everything
like an aching root within a tooth
and becomes an absence that we carry with us,
one that hangs like a mosquito net over every place we go,
where the hollower it grows with every mile,
the holier it becomes?
