Together Again
On a trip back to the Indiana Dunes
for a week of vacation, I drive past my mother’s
old house—corner of Idler and Wells—
several times a day. She’s been gone
twenty years, but I can’t help myself.
Sometimes I stop the car and just sit there—
engine running in my Mazda 3
(a car my mother would have loved)—
half-expecting I’ll see her again.
That she’ll throw open the front door,
wave to me from the porch, and call out:
Where are we off to today? Or this:
that I’ll hear a noise coming from the wetland area
and fifty red-winged blackbirds
will fly overhead, and we’ll gaze up—
my mother and I—marveling
at what the sky can hold. How much
is too much to ask for? The house
looks lovely. A new addition, expanded
kitchen from what I can see on Zillow.
I resist the urge to ring the doorbell,
introduce myself to the current owners,
which happened once to my mother,
the children who used to live there—
grown by then—stopping by to see
the inside. Sometimes my searching
only seems to lead to more searching.
Like in a dream I had where I was
searching for words in a puzzle
and every word I circled was:
searching. What’s the hurry of letting go?
Can’t we love the ones we’ve lost,
as much as the ones still alive?
John Banville said the past lives in him
like a second heart. And didn’t
Rumi say we seek what is seeking us?
So I keep driving by the house—
by the past that’s no longer there
and the past that is, always will be.
