Brian, this got under my skin in the best way. I didn’t grow up with woods in my backyard -- just pavement and heat and the odd mango tree someone hadn’t fenced off. We moved to South Florida from Detroit in the early 80s, not long after Adam Walsh was taken from the mall. But still, I rode my bike for hours, barefoot in the street, skin sticking to the seat, feeling free. I came home when it got dark or when my stomach reminded me.
I was raised Catholic and Christian, both. My dad’s family was deeply Catholic (rosaries, saints, holy water). My mom came from an Apostolic Christian line (strict, modest, no frills). I went to Catholic school first, then Christian schools, and graduated from a Baptist high school where dancing was banned and girls were taught our bodies were stumbling blocks. The end of the world was always hovering just out of frame (Rapture sermons. Warnings. Charts). We were told not to get too attached to the future. I heard more than once that Jesus would come back before I’d need to worry about things like sex or dreams or aging.
I dreamed anyway. I didn’t have woods to get lost in, but I got lost in language and in songs and the feeling that something in me was realer than what I was being told. That line you wrote -- “possessing what we were still unpossessed by” -- I feel that in my throat. I didn’t have the language for belonging back then, but I kept reaching for it.
I love your comment and that this piece resonated with you. Even after all these years, I’m never sure how much of my experience is analogous to people from other faith backgrounds.
Funny little side note: the line that you picked out is actually Frost’s. I include a line from The Gift Outright in each of these sections, in the same space it inhabits in the original poem. In his, he’s talking about the land of the US and the “we” are basically British colonists, and so part of the impetus for this project for me was to shift the relationship the speaker has with the land, specifically the immediate location and time, so that the poem is no longer about claiming ownership and dominion over a space, but recognizing how tied we are to those places and when those ties form and how those ties last even when we’re not in those spaces anymore and haven’t been for a long time.
Ahhh, that makes so much sense, and somehow makes the line even richer, knowing it’s Frost and you’re reworking it from the inside. That shift from ownership to relationship, from “ours” to we belong to it…yes! That feels deeply right. I didn’t grow up with land I could name like that, but I did feel claimed by certain places. Even though I only lived in Michigan a little while, it stuck. My dad’s one of 14, my mom’s one of 12, so we were always going back…to Detroit, the Great Lakes, old houses full of cousins and potato salad and yelling. That place felt holy and haunted in a way Florida never did. (Though Florida has its own weird magic, like sprinklers and heat mirages and lizards doing push-ups on the sidewalk.)
So yeah, I really felt that line (even if I misattributed it, ha) because it reminded me of that sensation of being quietly shaped by something you don’t even realize is shaping you. And I totally get what you mean about wondering how much carries across faith lines. So many of us who were raised in intense, rule-heavy religion are like scattered borderlings — different doctrines, same ghost.
Thank you again, for the poem, for the layers, and for being the kind of writer who makes space for memory to breathe a little.
Brian, this got under my skin in the best way. I didn’t grow up with woods in my backyard -- just pavement and heat and the odd mango tree someone hadn’t fenced off. We moved to South Florida from Detroit in the early 80s, not long after Adam Walsh was taken from the mall. But still, I rode my bike for hours, barefoot in the street, skin sticking to the seat, feeling free. I came home when it got dark or when my stomach reminded me.
I was raised Catholic and Christian, both. My dad’s family was deeply Catholic (rosaries, saints, holy water). My mom came from an Apostolic Christian line (strict, modest, no frills). I went to Catholic school first, then Christian schools, and graduated from a Baptist high school where dancing was banned and girls were taught our bodies were stumbling blocks. The end of the world was always hovering just out of frame (Rapture sermons. Warnings. Charts). We were told not to get too attached to the future. I heard more than once that Jesus would come back before I’d need to worry about things like sex or dreams or aging.
I dreamed anyway. I didn’t have woods to get lost in, but I got lost in language and in songs and the feeling that something in me was realer than what I was being told. That line you wrote -- “possessing what we were still unpossessed by” -- I feel that in my throat. I didn’t have the language for belonging back then, but I kept reaching for it.
I love your comment and that this piece resonated with you. Even after all these years, I’m never sure how much of my experience is analogous to people from other faith backgrounds.
Funny little side note: the line that you picked out is actually Frost’s. I include a line from The Gift Outright in each of these sections, in the same space it inhabits in the original poem. In his, he’s talking about the land of the US and the “we” are basically British colonists, and so part of the impetus for this project for me was to shift the relationship the speaker has with the land, specifically the immediate location and time, so that the poem is no longer about claiming ownership and dominion over a space, but recognizing how tied we are to those places and when those ties form and how those ties last even when we’re not in those spaces anymore and haven’t been for a long time.
Ahhh, that makes so much sense, and somehow makes the line even richer, knowing it’s Frost and you’re reworking it from the inside. That shift from ownership to relationship, from “ours” to we belong to it…yes! That feels deeply right. I didn’t grow up with land I could name like that, but I did feel claimed by certain places. Even though I only lived in Michigan a little while, it stuck. My dad’s one of 14, my mom’s one of 12, so we were always going back…to Detroit, the Great Lakes, old houses full of cousins and potato salad and yelling. That place felt holy and haunted in a way Florida never did. (Though Florida has its own weird magic, like sprinklers and heat mirages and lizards doing push-ups on the sidewalk.)
So yeah, I really felt that line (even if I misattributed it, ha) because it reminded me of that sensation of being quietly shaped by something you don’t even realize is shaping you. And I totally get what you mean about wondering how much carries across faith lines. So many of us who were raised in intense, rule-heavy religion are like scattered borderlings — different doctrines, same ghost.
Thank you again, for the poem, for the layers, and for being the kind of writer who makes space for memory to breathe a little.