Verses for Leaving

I.
Just a few days left
Until we fly away 
Leaving the garden to the blackbirds
The house empty and pronounced nice
By the realtor
Leaving behind the measuring wall
Showing the boy’s hand-span growth
Driving away from this was home
Leaving bad diagnoses and mad sadness
Here at the edge of the edge of the wheatfield
Of the world. Leaving a friend or two
Who are also bent on leaving
Leaving is what they do around here
Going away, never to return, 
How would you ever return?
How would you find again
The old music teacher’s house
On the edge of the world 
Except by the sunflowers and the 
Strains of Morning played 
On a phantom clarinet?

II.
The last day at the office
A day of returning and reckoning, 
Inventory item reconciliation, the
Signing of forms, surrendering
The corporate identity, shedding
Rituals of coming and going
Back to the source goes the laptop and credit card
Along with false industry and assumed expertise
Meet the envious glances with magnanimous good grace
Let your former colleagues maintain their illusion of stability
Maintain safety meeting and project kickoffs out of kindness
Off you go! Riding away into that 
All-American sunset.

III.

Leaving Grand Coulee Dam
Yesterday, I cast no backward glance
At the greatest thing built by the
Hand of Man
Occupied by other thoughts I gave no lingering look
To that Wonder of the World
No sign announced my departure
Reaching the top of the canyon 
Place of emergence onto the expanse of
Plateau. Pillars of dust rise on the land
The wind stirs the wheat, barley dances
In the spirit, along the barbed wire strand
Edging the road, straight and taut
Seeing for the last time the oasis of a farmtown
Green and dun wheatfields stretch away to the
Empty horizon

IV.
Last Saturday morning in the little house 
The little house at the edge
Edge of the wheatfield
Edge of the world
Last leisurely morning coffee looking out 
Across the scablands
Calm before disruption
The movers come tomorrow
Carting everything away
Leaving us here in the empty
As at the start, cleaning and clearing
And then the road.

V. 
The house full of boxes
Treasures in corrugated incognito
Stuffed with brown paper, cocooned
With little care
Rock collections, rifles, cooking pots
Books barometers toys
All away today on the truck
Reclaimed at some indeterminate
Time. Furniture goes, leaving us 
In an empty house. Dangerous
 Place, to clean and cull the leavings
Live out of suitcases, eat in socially
Distanced restaurants
They won’t burn the roof timbers
Or leave the bureau in the road
And friends bring us a love feast
Before the leaving, before the road
Before the wind, behind the sun.

VI.
I kindled one last holy fire
On that rainy cold July morning
Last of the twisted juniper branches
Small split of mountain larch
Piobrach playing on the laptop
Comfortable rumble of the drier
Dog asleep on the hearth, an chat griosach
Empty house, numinous space 
Caught between the coming and the going
All the morning fires, meaningless
Household fights, meals with
Friends, never to be completed
Repairs. A face looks back
Another darkly forward

House filled with echoes
House filled with rememberings
House filled with suppositions
Expectations, asssumptions
All dwindling behind us in the noonday
Sun, all fading into new endeavor
New hope, new places supplanting
The old. History in the camper shell of time
Progress is a rest stop
The days tick by with the mile posts
Past wheatfields, abandoned farms, dammed rivers
Clusters of commercial towns, ancient hills, 
Horse heaven
 weapon dumps
Moving from danger to danger
The peril from which there is no escape.

VII.
Fleeing south in an overloaded pickup – 
Cats dogs pistols all the dangerous goods the movers wouldn’t take
Through plutonium onion fields watered by the drowned river
Across wagon-breaking mountains 
Empty voids of sweet clover and telephone towers 
Pinon pine at last with the juniper
Coal miners’ last stand turned artsy summer town
We rest in a pre-fab cabin smelling of RV sewage
Another void of book cliffs and badlands
Rock castles rising against distant
Blue mountains. Family deprecations and 
Incantations. Across variegated
Mountains, through the Potato Administrative
Council’s domain (no red star on the sign?)
Mary is driving now all the time, I sit inert and sick
Dizzy and chemo nauseous we cross into Enchantment
Muddy rivers, old cottonwoods, and the wind
Until we reach the holy city under dark mountains
Holy sky filled with virgins’ weeping
Never reaching the ground, curtains of night
Spread across the burning sky

Author: Duncan MacNae

Exiled Gael, scion of the Dust Bowl, dweller within Divine Grace, admirer of mountains, I have made my peace with trout and the starlings. Looking for a river and healing trees. duncanmacduncan5@gmail.com View all posts by Duncan MacNae