A London Thoroughfare. 2 A.M.

They have watered the street,
It shines in the glare of lamps,
Cold, white lamps,
And lies
Like a slow-moving river,
Barred with silver and black.
Cabs go down it,
One,
And then another.
Between them I hear the shuffling of feet.
Tramps doze on the window-ledges,
Night-walkers pass along the sidewalks.
The city is squalid and sinister,
With the silver-barred street in the midst,
Slow-moving,
A river leading nowhere.

Opposite my window,
The moon cuts,
Clear and round,
Through the plum-coloured night.
She cannot light the city;
It is too bright.
It has white lamps,
And glitters coldly.

I stand in the window and watch the moon.
She is thin and lustreless,
But I love her.
I know the moon,
And this is an alien city.

-Amy Lowell, 1914

It's the same old story, really, and I want to dust off the same old quote from Thoreau--"The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels."--because my mind's been circling around like it hasn't got anything better to do. Maybe it hasn't. But I recently read another piece about home, and about the way we as humans upend our lives to move between places and countries. It's called 'On Not Going Home', and it's by James Wood, a English ex-pat living in America. It's a long one, and I'm not going to try to offer a precise summation; mostly I want to burrow back into my own feelings about living abroad. The subject dogs me.

Over the summer I picked up a copy of Hemingway's 'A Moveable Feast,' and I read it this fall, looking for some sort of insight about what it means to be an American abroad. I didn't find it. I am not Hemingway (nor was meant to be); the Lost Generation isn't mine; Tromsø isn't Paris (I have hopped from one city nicknamed after Paris to another; Saskatoon is ostensibly 'the Paris of the prairies', and Tromsø's been called 'the Paris of the north'). Hemingway's Paris was not just the city: it was Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound and James Joyce. I have a ragged sort of community here in Tromsø, but I wonder at how American Hemingway's Parisian community was, fundamentally.

Even if Hemingway's expatriate life was a different breed then mine, the quote the title of 'A Moveable Feast' was drawn from aligns with how I see the world: "If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast." I've never been to Paris, but I carry moveable feasts with me nonetheless; sometimes it seems that every place I've ever lived is somewhere in the knapsack of my mind. This week I was reading Donna Tartt's 'The Secret History', which takes place at a thinly veiled simulacrum of Bennington College and sends its characters gallivanting around the tri-state area. The book is about a murder and the leads are largely unsympathetic, but the landscape is familiar and the writing is evocative, and when the characters stopped in at what could only be the Cambridge Hotel (again, thinly veiled, but I can't imagine it's a place many would bother to recognize), something inside me ached. It's been a little while since I felt something I could tag so completely as homesickness; I savored it.

Which brings me back around to Wood's essay, where he notes, "For me, English reality has disappeared into memory, has ‘changed itself to past’...In America, I crave the English reality that has disappeared; childhood seems breathingly close." Wood has lived outside his home country for 18 years; I will not pretend I can match that measure. But I think Wood captures a fundamental piece of the moveable feast: the places we depart primarily live, for us, as part of the past. The Cambridge Hotel has, after all, closed. Hemingway's Paris was people as well as place. This is not to say--this is not to say anything in particular, except that maybe even a place that counted as home will not be the same on return. I am charting a course home, now, but I rather suspect that whatever I find there will be nearly as foreign to me as what I've found here; that the place I miss is not just a place, but a time. Still, my moveable feast feeds me well.

Poem

About the size of an old-style dollar bill,
American or Canadian,
mostly the same whites, gray greens, and steel grays
-this little painting (a sketch for a larger one?)
has never earned any money in its life.
Useless and free, it has spent seventy years
as a minor family relic handed along collaterally to owners
who looked at it sometimes, or didn't bother to.

It must be Nova Scotia; only there
does one see abled wooden houses
painted that awful shade of brown.
The other houses, the bits that show, are white.
Elm trees, low hills, a thin church steeple
-that gray-blue wisp-or is it? In the foreground
a water meadow with some tiny cows,
two brushstrokes each, but confidently cows;
two minuscule white geese in the blue water,
back-to-back, feeding, and a slanting stick.
Up closer, a wild iris, white and yellow,
fresh-squiggled from the tube.
The air is fresh and cold; cold early spring
clear as gray glass; a half inch of blue sky
below the steel-gray storm clouds.
(They were the artist's specialty.)
A specklike bird is flying to the left.
Or is it a flyspeck looking like a bird?

Heavens, I recognize the place, I know it!
It's behind-I can almost remember the farmer's name.
His barn backed on that meadow. There it is,
titanium white, one dab. The hint of steeple,
filaments of brush-hairs, barely there,
must be the Presbyterian church.
Would that be Miss Gillespie's house?
Those particular geese and cows
are naturally before my time.

A sketch done in an hour, "in one breath,"
once taken from a trunk and handed over.
Would you like this? I'll probably never
have room to hang these things again.
Your Uncle George, no, mine, my Uncle George,
he'd be your great-uncle, left them all with Mother
when he went back to England.
You know, he was quite famous, an R.A....

I never knew him. We both knew this place,
apparently, this literal small backwater,
looked at it long enough to memorize it,
our years apart. How strange. And it's still loved,
or its memory is (it must have changed a lot).
Our visions coincided-"visions" is
too serious a word-our looks, two looks:
art "copying from life" and life itself,
life and the memory of it so compressed
they've turned into each other. Which is which?
Life and the memory of it cramped,
dim, on a piece of Bristol board,
dim, but how live, how touching in detail
-the little that we get for free,
the little of our earthly trust. Not much.
About the size of our abidance
along with theirs: the munching cows,
the iris, crisp and shivering, the water
still standing from spring freshets,
the yet-to-be-dismantled elms, the geese.

-Elizabeth Bishop

Fish Story

A poem must break to the surface
and nibble at light,
confounding refraction
and swallowing sense
at a sudden bite
with wide-mouth contraction.

A poem must be cunning
to avoid rhetoric flies,
anglers baiting with lies -
must dart for white water and running.

If caught on the hook of meaning,
a poem must whirl and fight,
tugging and constraining,
alert for oversight.

Loose from the critical reel
a poem plunges once more,
moves beneath manifest current
outward from net and from shore.

-George Steiner, 1953

The Immigrant's Song

Let us not speak of those days
when coffee beans filled the morning
with hope, when our mothers' headscarves
hung like white flags on washing lines.
Let us not speak of the long arms of sky
that used to cradle us at dusk.
And the baobabs—let us not trace
the shape of their leaves in our dreams,
or yearn for the noise of those nameless birds
that sang and died in the church's eaves.
Let us not speak of men,
stolen from their beds at night.
Let us not say the word
-----------------------------disappeared.
Let us not remember the first smell of rain.
Instead, let us speak of our lives now—
the gates and bridges and stores.
And when we break bread
in cafés and at kitchen tables
with our new brothers,
let us not burden them with stories
of war or abandonment.
Let us not name our old friends
who are unravelling like fairy tales
in the forests of the dead.
Naming them will not bring them back.
Let us stay here, and wait for the future
to arrive, for grandchildren to speak
in forked tongues about the country
we once came from.
Tell us about it, they might ask.
And you might consider telling them
of the sky and the coffee beans,
the small white houses and dusty streets.
You might set your memory afloat
like a paper boat down a river.
You might pray that the paper
whispers your story to the water,
that the water sings it to the trees,
that the trees howl and howl
it to the leaves. If you keep still
and do not speak, you might hear
your whole life fill the world
until the wind is the only word.

-Tishani Doshi, 2013

From the First Book of Far Away

A mind littered with happy music, a heart broke
into quieted halves—what you take from the platter
is on the house. A shingled sequel, rain-swept sleeves.

Long forearms will lift you up to a place
the paint left clean of prints. Fingers spread
the slogans, over fences, under the dampened loft.

What happens here is memory—yours, to be exact.
A need to read the landmarks, a safe
cracked by fastidious hands. You will not qualify

everything, and you shouldn’t, even the night
it storms. Rooms crowd beneath the station as trains
stall for towns at a time. This is your country.

There are no shortcuts. The pages turn and you forget.

-Eileen G'Sell, 2014