Green (Home Pome)

(September 2021. This is the single poem to read if you would like to understand who I am. Long, philosophical, and personal.)

Green is the color of home.

Listen, see:

The self is yellow,
The color of light from the center,
Of our sun, a shining outward illumination,
The living universe, heat reaching beyond itself
Seeking to touch.

Blue is our environment,
The color of the world as we move toward it,
Ever evaded, ever the blue of distance on the farther ridge,
The color of far reaches, endlessly reached towards,
Reached into, the space to be filled, the longing to be whole, the fathomless
Depths, immersive, untouchable as light scatters away from us,
Out from us through the blue medium.

The yellow lives, the blue is lived in.
Yellow pushes, blue pulls.
Yellow evolves, enveloped
Within a world of blue
As the universe expands
Away and towards itself.

Their dialogue danced from the Big Bang
When yellow and blue first split,
And they have been trying ever since
To collide perfectly back together.

In the background plays a longing blues
Over which a golden alto sax is jazzed for joy
And occasionally licks in spasms
Orgasmic at the novel progeny
Of one’s own mix of silence and blowing.

What it feels like to be anything
(A star, a child, a squirrel, an acorn, a cell, an image,  
a writer, a reader, a river, a golden fish, an explorer, a lover)
Is what it feels like for yellow to push into blue,
For blue to pull yellow through it, 
For the self to press against the world,
For the environment to feel evolution,
For the actual to erupt in collisions of possibilities
And grasp blindly at water in dazzles of light.

We move along the world and leave imprints,
We carve contours of ourselves 
Through the malleable mediums we move through,
We make molds of the world,
We who were shaped by the world,
We the inverse ghosts of the world.
We are ever haunted by ourselves,
Formed by the world, reforming the world that forms us,
Reshaping ourselves in a concave mirror.

Things get tangled and messy if you try to trace the give and take
Of overlapping etiology, the genealogy of the self,
And I now think yellow and blue are impossible to disentangle,
And perhaps do not need to be distinct.
Self is always becoming environment, and
Environment is always becoming self.
The heat of the sun blows the breath of the self
Through the blue air; a bird moves like spirit
And becomes the shape of the air, 
And eats a worm the shape of dirt,
Dirt the shape of wormtrails, tunnels and dead worms
Giving life to the yellow tree thrusting upward
As it blues in the sky becoming environment for birds to fill
And monkeys to climb through, monkeys living in the living tree,
Environments to sisters and brothers and rivals and lovers,
Worlds even closer to their hearts than the bark
Pressing into their thumbprints, yells and languages and approvals
Touching their monkey minds more urgently than a cut in the skin.
Words are the energy of the sun and wide worlds of their own.
They surround the will of the monkeys, giving them what feels like choices,
Choices that respond to imagined environments and imply they exist
Inside at least one mind, a map impacting the territory,
A habitat of imagination, a new self and a new environment for all touched,
As every neuron and path is the nearby world for other neurons and
Other paths, all connected one way and another,
And none can be believed in alone without reference
To the rest of the environment of self,
Because everything touches and 
Some things touch very densely.

Perhaps self and world are one thing,
Perhaps Brahman is Atman,
Perhaps I am Walt Whitman,
Perhaps yellow and blue are merely directions in a circular spectrum…
Perhaps they are pure light, 
Seen from perspectives of coming or going, oblique angles and lines of sight, 
Toward infrared or toward ultraviolet, one something of the universe
The heart of which, for humans of rainbow eyes,
Is green, the color of home.

Did you think it meant nothing,
That blue water hit by yellow sun
One day struck, stuck, became green and alive?
And has been more and more alive ever since?
It is the only thing that means anything,
And what it means is imagined by green.

Something about the universe has always wanted to be green,
Has wanted the infinite to meet the finite, to be seen,
To live and die, neither omnipotent nor impotent.
In life, the principles of light and darkness
Found themselves, balanced,
Held together at the cost of time.

A green wilting is more beautiful than many rocks.

Every time self touches world,
There is the edge of the universe.
It is very fine, and sharp, and green.

The Cherokee know seven sacred directions:
North, South, East, West, Up, Down,
And Here-in-the-center, now, the deictic center, hereness as a direction,
And the color of this most sacred direction is green—
The seam of the present between
Vast paths of yellow and vistas of blue
Here and now, real, the only thing that is ever.

Here and now, grass grows green beneath your bootsoles.

Here and now, you are always more and more at home.

It seems I cannot touch anything without staining it green
And it staining me.
There are green traces everywhere when you know where to look,
Deep blues full of seaweed and emerald,
Yellow beaming light green and lime.
My fingerprints are lichens on rocks.
If I sit here long enough, I will grow invisible moss.
If I later return with my map, and sit,
I will surely feel it, this place already part of myself
(In the mossiness of my asscrack)
The way feelings linger on a string
Tied to hippocampal grid cells, place cells,
Lighting up green when I cross my own path
And make time touch by inhabiting space.
Though the space and I will have both changed,
Enough is the same to follow the green silk.

Home is in snail trails of self left in my wake,
Home is in sweatstains on the back of my chair,
Home is in dirty underwear and a certain spot by the lake.

Home can be as thin as the thin layer of cooler water
Clinging to my naked skin within the scalding hot springs–
I must move very slowly, and not break the membrane
Delicately balancing my burning in place. Even
If I do make a sudden move, I will only burn briefly unknown
Before my bare skin cools the new water just enough to bear
And I am once again fully home, there.

Home can be invisible when you are in it.
For most of my life, home was my parents’ house
For what is home but an accomodation,
A fitting of self to world, finding the opposite of friction,
Green and smooth between lovers adjusting.
This fitting seeks ceasing in comfort,
Continuity and seamless edges.

My address was an external identity,
Memorized and repeated and returned to, 
Inhabited when I had nowhere I needed to be,
The room a warm womb I called my own, an extension of my interior,
A pile of sand wriggled into with regularity, exactly the mold of my old body.

Home is not only where the heart is,
But why it beats,
And what it beats into.

Home is the hearth, the warm center outside ourselves,
The heat of life externalized and shared, the forge of the family.

I did not yet realize that home followed me, that I was the source of the green,
That it dripped from me, furrowed fertile fields wherever I found myself,
And that my house off Gardner’s Neck was just the lushest yet.

That realization came, as all do, only after I lost my accepted reality, 
Escaped comfort, escaped home, because I had to.
My house sank into New England tragedy, bleeding Hawthorne and Poe,
The descent into madness of those trapped
By walls, words, history, and snow. 
I do not know when I realized my dad was delusional,
Only that it made a lot of senseless suffering make some sort of sense.
After long yelling, he sat all night with the TV drinking, talking to himself,
Rambling, ranting, raving to nobody, a circular loop of a psyche closing
In upon itself, dousing feelings in alcohol and Ambien and lighting a match
To burn the past which he, the historian, could not carry.
Some egos become stronger than love, some addictions stronger than family.
Sometimes home is a rut— sometimes home can hurt—
And sometimes green algae is toxic in standing pools. 
And so, with the masochistic meaning-making mania of a desperate man,
I learned a need to flee, a need to leave homes,
Because homes are wombs and tombs.

I first fled to college, and made a new home there, but 
Quickly again I felt that fear of the abused, the anxiety of comfort,
The fear of being trapped.
I realized that I did not want to be molded by Harvard, did not want to fill
The ruts and contours of power that made minds
Small parts of large systems careening oblivious to obvious catastrophe.
I am glad I did not make myself too at home in that world.

I fled again, to the road, hitchhiking around America for months,
And hitchhiking, more than anything, taught me about home.
While I was frequently houseless I was never homeless. 
Home was in my blue backpack, carried everywhere with me,
Home was in the passenger seat of the driver who last picked me up, 
Home was the patch of soil I camped on or the couch I crashed on. 
Home became any trail I traveled, a mountain in Missoula, a bed & breakfast in the bayou.
If I woke up somewhere, it was home;
If I returned that night, I could already feel the homing,
Could feel latent seeds budding green.
The means of home were everywhere, are everywhere
Waiting patiently for need of me.

It turns out you must leave home to learn about home,
You must lose something to recognize it,
And you must give yourself up to the unknown in order to know anything.

This year I left all my old homes: the house, school, and the yellow girl I loved.
I went west in an empty school bus to build my own home.
It’s the best home I’ve had, the environment most shaped by myself.
The outside is painted blue;
The inside walls are yellow, and covered with poetry.
It means more to me than to anyone else.
Now I drip home like an oil leak wherever I park,
And home can both stay and stay mobile.

It seems in leaving and making many homes
More diversely green things grow in your soul.

Home is not only where one starts from,
But where one inevitably ends.
It is impossible to die anywhere but home.

If home is where one starts and where one ends, then
There must be something that is the opposite of home, 
Some magenta unknown found far from the lee shore, 
Some color we cannot see except in absence, 
Some mode of being accessed only by separation, the source
Of growth, the deepest darkest point in the adventure where the hero
Gains what is priceless and attempts to bring it home,
Where the self is lost
And found.

We make up magenta; there is no such wavelength.
If it were real we wouldn’t know, our cones can’t catch it;
The very act of seeing makes everything approach green.
But I believe in magenta because I believe in green,
As I believe in something behind my eyes because I believe I see,
As I believe in my own sunlight by the shadows I cast.
Imagination is the match of absence.

To let go of a home is to acknowledge that no claim is absolute.
Maybe nothing is ever really owned;
Maybe a better model of possession would begin with relationship,
And care, and cultivation— how home something is for you,
And how shared it is, matter most.

English, you pirate language, selfish, noun-obsessed!
You would have me draw so many silly lines
And forget my soft green edges, my gradient into the rest.
I must remember my continuity and contingency…
I move with a univerb, whole, coimpressed.

Perhaps poetry can pull me through the language
And point into what is real, beyond and behind it.

Writing poetry requires us to leave and come home,
To write our way back from blankness.

I think all my poetry is an adaptation to homesickness;
Perhaps this poem is a way of making myself at home
In a world wider than these words can wrap.

I will continue adventuring and continue coming home,
For through green home the blue world is known,
And through green home the yellow self knows.
The world folds on itself, and our garden grows.

As I live I would like to touch very much
And stain every possible green;
I will carry home anywhere I can be
And die there,
Everywhere present at once.