No choice but to follow (part 3) ...
Poets are time travelers. They move through time as swiftly as the mind darts from today to a dusty past, or from this known moment to an unknown future. The new Bamboo Ridge Press book No Choice but to Follow documents a year in the lives of poets Jean Yamasaki Toyama, Juliet S. Kono, Ann Inoshita, and Christy Passion as they created 48 linked poems.
In September of that year, Jean Yamasaki Toyama inherited the last line of Christy Passion's August poem ("Too many have been misled by this canvas") and wrote this poem, entitled "Canvas":
An old canvas bag tucked in between tattered boxes
lying on the floor of the storage room crisscrossed
by cobwebs:
I’m selling the family house.The canvas is yellow, splotched with brown hues
covered with dust from the ages.
Whose canvas bag?
I untie the knot that holds the heavy contents:
standard sized hammer, medium chisel, a few
five-inch nails.The rough surface of the canvas, the smell of lost time
scrape away the years and I see my father
coming home from work
tired, but happy to see us, his daughters.
We climb over him and empty his pant cuffs.
The sawdust of the day spills out.It’s like finding gold.
I love the line "The rough surface of the canvas, the smell of lost time." I read it slowly, then close my eyes to experience the images. What is it like to travel through time with the poet? What is it like when we find a new poem that excites us? The answer, of course, is in the last line of Jean's poem.
Juliet Kono's March poem, "Coming Home," navigates time as the poet remembers words once spoken to a son, then imagines the return of his spirit at some future time:
You were once told,
“No matter what happens
you can always
come home.”Come home,
I’ll be waiting.
So will the fields,
the tree by your window,
the collection
of Matchbox cars on the sill.Your room is as you left it.
Clothes that smell of you
remain in the closet.I haven’t had the heart to . . .
Should you walk up the hill,
I will see from my kitchen window,
the flurry of the roadside grass
in the rising dust.I will drop the potato I’m peeling,
and my hands will fly to my mouth.
I will run out to greet you.Embrace as you breeze by.
Which are more vivid in our minds, images of the past or those of the future? We live in the present, but our minds and spirits roam freely.
Tags: Ann Inoshita, Bamboo Ridge Press, Christy Passion, Jean Yamasaki Toyama, Juliet S. Kono, No Choice but to Follow
