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By chris Date: 2008 Jun 10 Comment on this Work [[2008.06.10.22.14.27042]] |
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I am from tidewater – from where an arm of the salt-heavy Atlantic reaches up to caress green riverbanks under skies nowhere near as blue as I remember them. I am from a place in the shadow of a city where Italian Irish Polish Russian Jewish Puerto Rican Dominican African- American came of age like me (and you and her and him) in deep concrete canyons where looking up can make you swoon and on the some days the sun sets in the afternoon. I am from exile – from Texas, New Mexico, Canada – from soft-focus Hill Country sunsets, from regrets not nearly numerous enough, from homemade peach cobbler and palmetto, from loss, from all-you-can-eat catfish under Spanish moss. I am from family – not one but several – found along the way like identities picked up on the shoulder of the Blue Ridge Parkway and then tossed into a Tennessee tobacco field or lost in the sun while crossing the Mississippi at Memphis and into a New World (which I am also from). I am from many lives – from puzzles yet to be pieced together. I am from the desert – from rain promised but evaporated somewhere along the way. I am from the New Mexico classroom - from chalkdust and caliche. (I am from everything that is from me.) I am from chiles green and red – the kind you smell roasting on gold fall afternoons (and thereafter never out of season), the kind you smother rolled enchiladas and stuffed sopapillas with – the kind hot enough to make you cry for no good reason. I am from the printed page, from the word - from poems written too quickly and life stories stories labored over far too long. I am from questions – each and every honest “Why?” I am from music, from all the songs and all the voices I’ve ever heard – an amazing multiplicity like only the stars in the sky. |