The poems tells most go the story. The rest you will be able to read in the book, Excuse For Being Here, which Just Write Books will soon be releasing, a mix of Thoreau inspired poems, prose text on Thoreau, perhaps too much of my own biography. The poem tells the truth: a vision of the room in which my father slept in the summer, in the main house keeping a close eye and hand of The Chute Homestead: that vision of the bed, the pillow, the blod spot did appear as I revised the Emerson poem but I don't think my father died of TB, however real the blood spot was.
Found Memory
2013: I find, read, consider revision
of a poem written 25 years ago.
Emerson Spends A Restless Night: 1831
He woke to her cough, felt the tense
curve of her back, the sharp contraction
of her chest. The dark was all enveloping.
Curtain open he could not sense separation
from bed-chamber and moonless space.
He knew at the first cough, knew as if
a window opened and November's
cemetery chill suddenly swept in. He
could not shut his mind to his mother
saying "use cold water for a blood spot
or the cloth will be forever stained."
But in the morning Ellen folds, hides
her handkerchief, an offering to this
new divinity whose mark she knew
the coldest water would not wash away,
and in her journal wrote "I am the grave's.
It's seal is set upon me."— and I,
suddenly, or think I suddenly remember —
the blood spot on my father's pillow
in one of those 1940 years so long ago.
I know I've told you they didn't tell me
he was ill or what the illness was, that,
brought home, I don't recall the funeral
although I must have been there — and yet —
and yet that blood spot has not washed away
as Emerson's mother says "I told you so!"
and Ellen: "Death will have it's offering."
