Leaving Home
A Poem by John Palen
We could have stayed, we say to ourselves when mom sounds
the least bit lonely on the phone or we read in the round-robin
that dad doesn’t change the oil anymore; we could have
taken over the store or the farm, or at least come back
after college and lived close by, pursuing our own careers.
There would have been the living to make and tv and the weather:
nostalgic autumns, mild winters with false spring
in January, then the long real spring, and then summer,
its heat broken by those dramatic storms off the plains.
We tell ourselves we could have stayed and raised our kids
and shared our parents’ lives, the way it’s supposed to be.
But we know we couldn’t, and that if we tried no one would be
more horrified than they. Where after all did we learn
this leaving home if not from them, whose genes must look
like
passports, with
stamped on the helixes? When these foreparents weren’t ducking
the draft or looking for a quick zloty, they moved anyway,
for
scenery’s sake: from
Who could tell the two apart? But these people
argued the trees, the taste of water and the width of streets,
and liked the new place better, and stayed awhile.
so it should be no surprise that our parents are packing up,
selling out, moving away. We worry about their trauma;
I think we feel it more. Old Mason jars and dusty books,
plaster hands that prayed in the darkness of the garage
for thirty years – when these are knocked down at auction
for half a dollar, part of us gets knocked down, too.
But to our parents it’s all just junk. They’re happy
to see the house clean, even if they had to empty it,
they’re happy about the new town, the new place,
the plumbing’s new and so are the kitchen cabinets.
Come visit anytime. Stay as long as you like,
they say. But they know we’ve got to be moving on.
We need practice in this rootless, seedlike freedom,
in the almost casual gracefulness of their letting go.