it’s just a war, another one, you won’t remember all the little stuff about it
Portsmouth New Hampshire. Photo by Ken Hawkins
You said “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried like something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”
You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
You’ll walk the same streets, grow old
in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses.
You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere
There is no ship for you, there’s no road.
Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.
C.P. Cavafy
This poem has haunted me since I read it in high school. “There is no road,” it says. I can’t leave Greenland, New Hampshire? I wanted to believe Kerouac in “On the Road”, but I secretly believed this poem to be truer. There is no road. No liberation. No redemption. Kerouac lied.
It’s going on 8 years since I’ve lived in New Hampshire. I spent ten years on ships and on roads looking for a place that felt better than New Hampshire. I have come to learn that the world is on fire. Right in the earth’s center the air is molten. How can we have a stable existence with an unstable core? People claim to be cold and lonely, never hot and lonely. They’re too far from the center. I’m not only getting older, I’m getting smaller too…the earth’s center is molten, I can’t make a decision. Mirrors reverse words and images left to right but not up to down…is that because of gravity? Some things, even if we understand them, we can’t change.