Eva H.D., "Bonedog"

       JoAnn Verburg photo.

                                                

Bonedog

 

Coming home is terrible.

Whether the dogs lick your 

face or not; whether you

have a wife or just a wife-

shaped loneliness waiting

for you, coming home

is terribly lonely so

that you will even think 

of the oppressive barometric 

pressure back 

where you have just come 

from with fondness

because everything is worse

once you're home.

You will think of the

vermin clinging to the 

grass stalks, long hours

on the road, roadside

assistance and ice creams

and the peculiar shapes

of certain clouds

and silences

with longing

because you did not want

to return;

coming home is just

awful, and the homestyle

silences and clouds

contribute to nothing

but the general

malaise. The clouds,

such as they are,

are in fact suspect

and made from a different

material than those

you left behind.

You yourself are cut

from a different

cloudy cloth,

returned, remaindered,

ill-met by moonlight,

unhappy to be back,

slack in all the wrong

spots, seamy suit

of clothes, dishrag-

ratty, worn.

 

You return home

moonlanded, foreign,

the earth's gravitational

pull an effort now redoubled

dragging your shoelaces

loose and your shoulders, 

etching deeper the 

stanza of worry

on your forehead,

you return

home deepened,

a parched well,

linked to tomorrow

by a frail strand of

anyway:

you sigh

into the onslaught

of identical days, one

might as well

at a time.

 

Well, anyway,

you're back,

the sun goes up

and down like a

tired whore,

the weather immobile

as a broken limb

while you just keep

getting older.

Nothing moves

but the shifting tides

of salt in your body.

Your vision blears.

You carry your weather

with you, big

blue whale, a

skeletal darkness;

you've come back

with X-ray vision;

your eyes have become

a hunger.

You come home

with your mutant gifts

to a house of bone.

 

Everything you see now.

All of it. Bone.

                                    -Eva H.D.

                                  (The poem is recited by Jessie Buckley, playing the protagonist in Charlie Kaufman's film I'm Thinking of Ending Things)