THE OLD COUNTRY

7 5 R T H E O L D C O U N T R Y V O N A G R O A R K E I came out of that country with one suitcase crammed with newspaper, seeds in every fold. No. That’s not it. No seeds and no newspaper. My suitcase was full of snow and the shadow of snow which is another way of saying it was full of lies. I had been there for years, whole months of them. And then, just like that, words stopped calling on me, street signs flipped inside out. My neighbors swopped faces. The blue door was, by nightfall, paler blue. On clean days, hail pockmarked the pillows. I try not to picture it. Or to calculate heartbeats, blood I bled, rooms undressed, ways of waking up, ounces in an ounce of love. 7 6 Y I am scattering ink-white ashes as I write. Sometimes I think you live a day and it passes through you like a ghost on a landing and sometimes I think there is no landing and the ghost cannot be me. ...