Camber Selected Poems 1983-2000

ON LEAVING Leaving home is the beginning of resemblance. David Seymour On leaving, you circulate among the things you own to say farewell, properly, knowing they will not cease to exist after your departure, but go, slowly, each in its own way, wild. So long and thanks, with one last chop, tap, twiddle. It won't work just to flip them into negatives minus T-shirt, minus Roger Tory Peterson both east and west nor to convert them into liquid assets. This is no yard sale, this is loss, whose interior is larger than its shell, the way you wish home was. Do not dig the dog's bones up nor the rosebush by the porch. Choose a few companions of no weight a crow feather found in the parking lot, the strawsmell of her hair, a few books of the dead,1000 Best Loved Puns. And leave. There is a loneliness which must be entered rather than resolved, the moon's pull on the roof which made those asphalt shingles shine. A time for this, a time for that, a time to let them both escape into whateverness, a time to cast away stones, to stop building and remembering and building artful monuments upon the memories. To leave. To step off into darker darkness, that no moon we call new.McKay, Don is the author of 'Camber Selected Poems 1983-2000', published 2004 under ISBN 9780771057656 and ISBN 0771057652.