The heretic of space, place, and identicality
Has been so long in love with similarity. When
You can’t have the divine, you settle for reality.
The past has changed again. New owners
On the Heraclitan creek. “No, we moved in
Three years ago, almost, we never knew them.”
What? Never knew the previous owners,
The three pleased and proud old widow witches
Who pooled their savings to rescue and restore
These fishing cabins of Vardis Fisher and Ernest
Fucking Hemingway? Who lovingly created
Kitsch themes for every cabin—sailor, cowboy,
Pilgrim? Who drove once a month to Jackpot,
Nevada, to play the slots and blackjack together?
Who became a twosome and then a lonesome
As change had its way with them? How could even
The memory of the last surviving owner’s
Banana-yellow Subaru, which she kept immaculate
For fifteen or twenty years, always parked
In front of the cabins when she was in,
Fail to have been mentioned to the new team?
The new owner, of retirement age herself
From the looks of it, shakes her head again.
“Nope. Nobody’s ever mentioned a yellow car.”
I can remember when, on a Mother’s Day,
The then two surviving owners had a party
With both their families sprawling by the stream
Athwart the paying customers like me,
And it was something you’d have thought
Had escaped Breughel’s, or at least Williams’s
Kermess. Somewhere, I assume, surviving children
And grandchildren still remember these women,
Even if the place they gallantly bought together
And remade as a going concern, has erased them.
Daughter and I were down at the stream into twilight
Last night, talking over the rapids, playing,
Her chasing frogs and practicing handstands.
Swallows and herons sketched the skies.
Perpetual ghosts of mere similarity haunted.
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