My House is Built on Words

October arrives to Montana without the stark color changes and shift in winds as it does in Michigan.  But it comes.  Arrives with a crisp chill in the morning, wet rains that flirt with snow in the late evening and the scent of leaves (even though they aren't the hardwoods of my home) still smell the same.  And my favorite part, biking to work and seeing the peaks dusted white overnight.  October is such a full word, the shape of your mouth saying it--O c t o b e r--is so open like all the o's the word holds.  Open to so much change, so much shifting.

A curious fact about October is that more poems have been written during this month than any other.  Not too surprising since it is the month of shorter days and dramatic sun breaks away from the grey brings great relief.  Maybe since poetry has a way of slowing our thoughts down as does this month when we turn to our beds for longer hours of refuge, cook soups made of squash and drink tea to warm the chill do we have time to reflect.  More time for quiet.

I have a lot of quiet in my home.  Sometimes too much.  I hadn't noticed all this silence during the first few months of painting, grouting and yes I am proud to say even electrical installing of lights.  Bed was the only option after exhaustion.  Sleep a mere respite and then silence filled me.  I hadn't noticed the echo from all the absence of sound until I had to close my windows.  It can be an odd hum, silence, and a great welcome to the other sounds too often overlooked, the clock in another room, the shift of your weight in a chair and even the sound of your feet walking in socks on a wood floor and then the echo of trains passing behind muffled glass.

At night,  silence is the loudest and the least welcome.  I have been filling my days with new activities such as cyclo cross, starting a 30-day yoga challenge and taking a break from house projects.  Trying to fill my days with new sounds in order to find a new sense of myself in this familiar town.  But I must admit, it just feels like noise.  I really adore it all, especially the cyclo cross which exhausts me and asks more of my body than any other activity I have yet to try, but then I come home and hear the shift in sound to my refrigerator, my borrowed cat yawns and it is just the metal of my mailbox opening in hopes of word from afar and then closing that feels a bit empty.  A train calls out and leaves as if reminding me, I don't have to stay.

And so even now in the newly painted walls of my own home, the deed somewhere with my full name rests signed in black pen, I still return to what has comforted me when all I owned was a backpack and a quick smile, I return to words.  Words borrowed, written, asked out loud to all this silence and sometimes even begged in the darkness.  Words I don't know I look up, words that I banned myself  to use I say sometimes when I want to throw up on a hill during cyclo cross.  I try to spit those words out and other words I dare risk to use I whisper to the late night glow of my alarm clock.  I practice. I practice with words because I cannot seem to stop feeling.  And I have a pretty good guess that the feelings aren't going anywhere fast.  Maybe they'll just change to different ones.   I am just going to work at finding better words instead of "better" feelings.  No matter how much work I fill my days with or how hard I sweat and spit out my past, I know if I keep working, I can find new words.  For words are the soft touch to a worried head the cool wash cloth at rest on a collapsed heart.

I wish I could tell you my first word was something monumental, like illuminate or even turtle, it was hot.  One syllable and not even very visual.  Once I dated a man who told me his first word was hedgehog, to which I replied, pretty good, but that's no porcupine.  And so a poem comes from all this silence in hopes to find a new way to look at what lies ahead and what rests.  And what I hope to write.


The Porcupine

We walked out into the night
walked along the road without lights,
summer still on our skin, wind in oaks
caught the dim hum of stars.

Maybe I knew our bodies
were fading into autumn by the scent
no longer sweet in late evening, just earth
cold as night dew.

We held hands and didn't speak.
Gravel under our flip-flopped feet,
our hearts somewhere ahead
of us in October.  Fallen.

Out walked a porcupine
straight down the center of the road
long claws, heading straight,
grunting with each step.

We stopped, hands squeezed, breath
held and stood back to let the rodent
pass.  Squinting to find light, grey glow
of needles at rest, passed.

I tucked my hands in my pocket,
a warm breeze came up and I looked
to the east, not doubting the sun would come
again.  And loss is just a word
for what no longer comforts.