‘To Do List’
— Joyce Chong
So you named a man Home
Forgot that home is a construct
—like Love. Still, you stayed while he took mallet to foundation
Renamed you: Rubble, Heap, Broken Tile Girl
This week, a wonderful poem published in The Rumpus by Christine No on time and death and family and relationships, and all their burr-like entanglements. After reading this poem, I realized I don’t encounter enough longer poems, ones that really ruminate and fold in multiple recurring threads and thoughts into one larger entity. It’s the length that really reflects the complication of all these ties we bear to others.
So you haven’t made the
Short drive home
Scared of what other silence she’s
Tucked in the lines on her forehead,
Gathered around her mouth:
—You are too old to be wanted
The contemplation of passing time and age, where we love and who and how we love. Notions of age and cut-offs, to be “too old”, or having spent too much time, things that cannot be pulled back from the abyss over which they’ve passed. The intertwining of things we lose to time, our worries over wasted or misplaced love. This poem seems all-encompassing of an entire decade, what it is to be growing through transitory periods, instability and uncertainty. How notions of home are constructed, held aloft but indistinct, the things we find in one another, the things carried across three generations of women.
All that you’ve neglected? This to-do list:
32 years of misplaced construct
The punctured disappearances
Your empty hands