Seattle Sonata (legato, every note legato)

I - razbliuto

It’s hard to be in love with

someone who can change so much.

My city left me behind chasing

a seat at the table when 

our table was already set,

overflowing with possibility and

and art and people who can’t afford

to live here anymore. I live an hour

away now and don’t know how to feel when

I see her. Something like longing. Something

like disappointment. Something I worry is

like a word I learned once at her side,

the Russian word that names the feeling

you have for someone you once loved

but no longer do. I worry that’s true.

II – in Russian

There’s no such word in Russian. You can say,

“I once loved you but no longer,” but there’s

no shorthand for it. No sum up. Despite being

in the books of so many experts, so many linguists —

no such feeling in its source language. Best guess:

a typo in a 60s tv show. Replicated somehow to now.

A not-Russian word that only exists in English.

III – object permanence

I feel home, though, in some of the same places.

Pioneer Square and the Seattle Center, bookends

of a past continually overwritten and a future imagined once,

two half-truths preserved in architecture.  These buildings at least

feel real to me, like they’ll still be there when I turn around.

It’s hard to feel steady when you’re surrounded by disappearances,

a constantly changing view. How much was ever really there?

I trust the old bricks and concrete most in this city.

[Still not more than the trees that grow up the ravines.]

IV – no what

it’s hard to tell        someone you left

everything they would’ve needed to change

for you to keep wanting them.

you shouldn’t try. living things change,

it is just hard to love living things

(harder not to) the city is a living thing,

you know. like I am a living thing to

the microscopic creatures that populate

my body who make it somewhere

I can live too. no me without them.

no city without who? hard to say

for a city bleeding out. what are you losing?

when will you notice? and what

will you do then?

 

V – somehow it’s not happening here but

Sometimes I have to speak so plainly that my voice gets lost in the words.

It’s to be understood when you’re swimming against misconceptions.

It still only works when someone will listen. Is willing to hear.

VI – why here

My writing exists because this is home. Me born to another city

is another artist, who knows her medium? Something about this

place keeps breathing me words. Maybe it’s the dense undergrowth,

so many places for a whisper to catch and hide, to wait for you.

So easy to move slow here, easy to spend an hour on the bus

or twenty minutes walking. Cars dull my senses, speed me up

to where I can’t catch the details anymore. I write more when

I am slow in the world, and this home made that so easy

for so long. It’s harder to get here now, but when I can

the whispers are still waiting, falling with the pine needles

or pushing up with irises, caught in the air of a bumblebee’s

fuzz as they sleep in a rosebud. Other places have flowers,

but these ones know my name.

VII – whole-body ear

I wear thinner shoes now

and can feel the streetcar

fifty feet away, every move

and stop spreads sensation

across the soles of my feet.

This place always teaching

me new ways to listen.

VIII – what about the other colors

Thick pigeons flock and split

like a grey kaleidoscope no one is turning

in the one hour we have of snow.

So many land together three stories up,

a whole crenellation of plump birds.

The rest must’ve gone west somewhere,

maybe past the clock tower,

I can’t see them now.

IX – cadence

I think what I want is for hometown to mean something.

Something tangible, more than longing or nostalgia,

to mean something with a body. Some kind of right

to live in your home. Some new knowing (not new

to me) that these streets were parents for some of us.

Some of us were raised by buildings and bus routes

and empty auditorium stages, by old old trees,

by blackberries and sticky rhododendron blooms and

the salmon that come home every year to become

the stream again. Some of us were raised by

pavement and school fields and drainage ditches.

By strangers and being a stranger show after show.

By the water that runs over all of them. (us.) None

of these are just images. This is not a poem, it’s

a map. This is not a poem, it’s a lineage. I am

telling you my family. I am telling you my home.

I am telling you one of the saddest things I know,

that none of this  is allowed to matter more than

money in the city that’s been built here. Maybe

what I miss is like parents before you find out they

are only human too. I am not surprised by the

changes here anymore. But I am surprised

by the things no one notices. I live in shock that

we have no right to our home.