HOME AND ABROAD

by Barbara Rendall
　

Home and Abroad

     The poems that make up this small collection are all related to the experience of living abroad, although at first it may be hard to see what an old house in Buffalo, New York, or three acres above the Bras d'Or Lakes in Nova Scotia have to do with the varied adventures of the expatriate life.

     Everyone agrees that any time spent abroad enriches our lives; learning about another culture from the inside is always a fascinating experience.  But the benefit is more than just personal. Living in another country can foster a kind of universal sympathy that seems to be harder and harder to come by. It makes us realize that just as we value our own way of life above all others, there are millions who hold their own very different ways just as dear.  If everyone could learn this, our world would be a simpler place in which to live.

     But time spent abroad also has much to teach us about that more familiar place, the one we left behind.  A certain amount of homesickness, nostalgia, and deprivation can bestow a clearer appreciation of home.  It helps us to better understand where we have come from and reminds us of what in life, no matter where it is lived, is truly valuable.

     In addition, sometimes an interesting reversal takes place: the longer we are in a foreign place, the more it becomes home, and conversely, time and distance cast a little of the shadow of strangeness back upon what was once our only home, just enough to bring out new facets in a familiar landscape.

     During the time lived in a new place, we tend to collect small treasures to remember the experience by-- a local painting,  a stone carving, a bit of embroidery.  But also in our thoughts are the treasures left behind, packed away in a sealed box in a locked house, and we are increasingly aware of how absence has added to their value.  The journey will only be truly complete when we arrive back home and add the new keepsakes to the old and experience the satisfaction of having all our most cherished possessions in one place.

     The thoughts and images from home and abroad collected in these poems anticipate that moment, and they are of course dedicated to Tom, without whose belief in "really living in a place," rather than just traveling through, they would never have come to be.

Barbara Rendall

Note:   "East India Company Wives" first appeared in Queen's Quarterly and "Magic Catholicism" in The Antigonish Review.

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East India Company Wives

The old, far world has grown so small,

Reduced by the long voyage to a miniature on the wall,

To just a lovely, distant story

In which they lost themselves one gentle afternoon

(Though they barely remember how afternoons were gentle).

Shanghaied from their country gardens,

Their hill-tucked English villages,

All rural courtesy and ritual--

What can make them happy here?

On this strangely dry protruberance,

The fraying edge of Asia,

There's little gentleness and no true green

Despite the warmth, the sudden violent rains,

The thick brown flow of river all around;

The air, like layers of infinite damp blankets,

Stills them to inaction,

Drenches them with sweat they never knew they had,

Reduces them to just their petticoats,

Traps them on strange Iberian balconies over the sea

In a life at the edge of an enormous cup of tea--

The slow, dull effort to recreate the social niceties

And life itself, from scratch, amid such strangeness;

Husbands up-river in China with dubious cargo on their minds,

Help that does not help,

Odd bugs in the cakes, old recipes that fail,

The moldering of walls and clothes and purpose,

The children left behind,

The flowered cups  and saucers broken on the voyage,

And the fragile sense of self that cracked in transit

And lies beneath a slowly-turning fan, past salvaging.

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Expatriate

Five hard months a foreigner,

And what have I earned?

The satisfaction of following my nose

Down any cobbled lane

No matter how narrow,

How peculiar-smelling,

How clogged with people, vegetables,

Doomed chickens, or racks of defective track suits,

And coming out somewhere I faintly recognize,

Unfazed, armed with a good hunch

That this travessa must flow eventually

Into some estrada I've drifted by before--

Catching the currents,

Working my sails,

Surviving my own ignorance,

Bobbing along the surface of other people's lives.

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Anti-Tropical

The same thick, humid soup spooned up

From the bottomless pot of paradise, day after day,

Still leaves me hungry,

Longing for contrast and change,

For that nourishing spread of seasons

Laid on by the temperate zones,

A menu that rotates:

Huge feasts of late light in July,

And deep five-o'clock dark in December,

Fields heat-soaked in August,

Then frozen to bleakness in winter;

And those charmed reversals--

Warm, running thaws in mid-March

Just as I'd given up hope;

Nights suddenly cooling in fall, like a switch turning off;

The keen edge of it whetting the appetite over again

Just as the plate grows dull,

Making me greedy each day for the next,

For whatever might come on the turn of the wind.

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Magic Catholicism

Macau

They hauled it all in ships, around the Horn,

Those bearded Portuguese, all the terrors

And wonders of my childhood; it's all here,

Every bit of it, the same high banks

Of feverish candles, the hot-wax smell

Hanging like a heavy velvet curtain I lift again

On all those sacred things that brim with mystery--

Slivers of wood and bone and scraps of cloth

Sealed under glass before they burst

With the density of their meaning;

The rituals, rules, the lessons in stone

So burning and sure and delectably flawed;

The romance of stricture and terror and guilt.

Yet how lucky, really,

What a marvelous, difficult blessing--

To have known and mastered all this,

Like learning a complex tongue at an early age--

To be a medieval survivor,

Muck and magic clinging to my cloak,

A drinker of blood and eater of flesh, schooled in miracles,

Eager and able to admit the possibility

Of nearly anything wonderful or terrible enough,

Having had as an intimate mentor so long ago

The secret source, this force of metaphor,

Behind the deep-carved stone, the fretted woodwork,

Like a hidden spring.

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Welcoming The Snake

                                                           Lunar New Year, 2001

In the driveway of the New Century Hotel

All traffic halts

As three small men, one with a ladder,

One with a graceful bamboo pole,

And one with a fourteen-foot string of explosives

Arrange a garland for the festival.

They loop and drape and balance each element

As other artists of joy might build a tower of cake,

Or dress a bride-to-be--just so. Then, out of a huddle,

They conjure a flame that flares, catches,

And leaps the red spine, exploding, exploding, exploding,

Tearing the air to violent rags of noise.

Smoke boils upward, heaves skyward,

Then remembers and bends, downward, slowly,

Filling the road, driving a thousand terrified ghosts before it.

The appalling racket echoes in the gut

Of everything alive for blocks around,

And the world is as clear of evil as it will ever be.

Then a wide silence descends like an unexpected gift,

And people get on with their holiday,

Their visits and feasts, and the just-in-case

Honey smeared on the lips of the household god.

Relatives cram the sidewalks six abreast,

Innocent in bright new shoes and clothes the color of luck,

Happy to share the streets with anything auspicious--

Detonations and drums, lions and dragons,

Even a snake, beautiful this one year out of twelve,

Its favor worth currying.

Today it sets itself up in the public squares,

A sinuous creature fashioned of silk,

Luminous, redeemed,

Traveling upright on the back of a tortoise,

Amazed to find itself welcomed with eager arms,

Respectable now, after so long a wait,

Its sly eyes cunningly wired for light,

Gleaming, ready--lucky, lucky at last.

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Bougainvillea

Woody and knowing,

The old vines wind up, out from dry crevices

That have never known how sweet earth can be,

Cling wherever,

Vault over walls, leap like fire across rooftops,

Hurling color,

Waves of essential purple, pink, and rose

That burn the heavy air.

The yearning of beauty over walls,

Spilling itself into a canopy, a tree,

Or the whole complicated roofline of a village

Is the story of aspiration at these latitudes,

A tale of the eternal calculation

Of the distance to the light,

A glimpse of the constant departure

Of perfection from the earth.

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Biking Across Beijing

I ride at the heart of a gathering wave

Spun from bright metal and April air;

Hundreds, thousands are with me, bearing me on,

Agreement on wheels,

Courage in numbers at ring road crossings

Where old men beside me on tricycles shield me

From certain death with fantastical towers of junk.

Like beautiful, nonchalant skaters

My fellow travelers on Flying Pidgeons, sturdy Forevers

Telegraph every intention with a tweak of the wheel,

Or an eloquent bending to left or to right.

The pressure to keep up to speed is unspoken, but everything.

Falter, and I will be doomed, a straggler

Suddenly faceless, left behind,

But together we fly

Riding a perfect tension spun from two wheels--

Singular longing and group solidarity--

The finely-tuned motion of one billion people

With a fixed destination in mind.

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Duncan's Place

Dear Duncan,

We've never met, of course--

You died so strangely years ago--

But living on this hill, once yours,

Hearing bits of stories,

Our lives still touch in certain ways and places.

I know you in the calmness of the view down to the lake,

In the long, reclining hills across the water

That stretch to east and west,

And, especially at this time of year,

In the waves of wildflowers

That gather, crowding every shade of purple into pink,

So high their beauty reaches nearly to my lips.

Time doesn't change such things,

And I wonder if they touched you, too.

Your little makeshift house is gone,

The one the neighbors built for you

When the old one you inherited burned down,

And I feel a little guilty.

It was the people before us--I'll blame them--

Who cleared it off so they could build,

Hauled it deep into the weeds and used it for a shed;

When we moved here, we wondered why a shed

Would have a mirror on the wall,

And half the inside pink, the other bitter green.

Then gradually, mixed up with our hoses and tomato cages,

We found homely things: a stovepipe,

A rusty drop-side toaster, clothes hooks on the wall,

And the giveaway, above the windows,

Whole sets of curtain rings.

It dawned on us, this was someone's home,

Someone led a life in here,

And we are trespassers on our own land.

Nevertheless, it was a creaking hazard

In the autumn winds, so we were the ones

Who tore it down last spring, most disrespectfully,

With a pickup truck, a rope, and the anchor from our sailboat.

We hooked it, pulled it, cracked it with an axe,

Using all the physics we could improvise

Until it gave, and folded slowly in upon itself,

And went to rest beneath the goldenrod and wild daisies.

A tidy job, and yet I felt the sin it was

Against that private space you lived in,

Where you grew odd, they say,

After the girl you were to marry failed to show,

Even though you'd started building a new home for her next door;

You turned the big, sad, half-built place

Into a barn instead and filled it,

So our woodman told us,

With forty, maybe fifty cats

And six raccoons, and all of them running to you,

Out from the barn, some dropping from the trees,

When you came to the door of the little house and called, "Puss-puss!"

The buried ruins of that barn are under our side lawn

Where no tree we plant will grow--

The ground's too thick with rock and board and other things

Beneath its thin, deceptive layer of earth.

More of your story lies beyond that lawn,

On the green breast of the slope above the brook

Where we've found the glitter of your solace underneath some trees,

Years' worth of broken bottles heaped

Where, our neighbor says, you and his grandpa

Could be found of an evening

With your pints or jars or jugs of brew.

You might be pleased to see I've salvaged

The few bottles that stayed whole, some pretty ones,

And put them in our big south-facing window

Where they fill with light and sky and lake,

The view you knew.

Your oddness was your space, your space your oddness,

Painted with ends of other people's paint,

Though there were little comforts: the cats,

The drinking buddy, and kind neighbors

Who sent their children down the frozen road in winter,

Pulling your groceries on their sleds,

Or across the brook and up the field in summer

With fresh baking, a local lady told me,

To your little refuge at the midpoint of the hill

That looked steadily down to the lake, year after year,

From in between the drifts of snow, the drifts of flowers.

I hope the flowers helped.  They might have,

Because I found a struggling little garden in the brambles,

Like a lost bouquet, peonies a violent purple-red,

Ringed by a lush thatch of lily of the valley,

Passionate and delicate all at once.  I like to think

You planted it for her before she came, a welcome,

Before you knew she wasn't coming--

Or maybe it was later.

Imagining either makes you seem less odd,

And your strange death, brought on by a bad scratch

From one of the teeming crowd of cats

(I can almost hear your neighbors sigh, "Well, what

would you expect, the place was overrun...")

Less pointless and inevitable.

Whatever rules these matters,

It's fallen to me to tend your view a while,

A flower-while,

A shifting space in time, brief and true

As a gathering of blue reflected in a bottle in a window,

And it makes me wonder if I have it in me

To grow odd myself, in spite

Of a life of sturdy reality, of intricate love

I take for granted like good weather.

It could happen to any one of us, it seems to me,

Were we enough alone,

And if we let the flowers woo us,

And the ghosts brush near enough

As they drop from the trees,

Quietly, one by one,

Green-eyed, graceful,

The only creatures truly

At home upon the land.

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Custom and Ceremony

July 10, 1999

Outside,

The summer sky, steady and grand

As a high blue sail,

Bears this day forward,

All happiness held in its curve--

Inside, tall candles

Balance the equation of light

And among the assembled guests

Memories are lifted gently

From soft places of repose

Along with heirloom jewelry and boutonnieres,

And all through the afternoon

The daisies, the lilies, the wild roses

Banked at the altar, gracing beribboned pew-ends,

Resting on bridesmaids' arms,

Open to their fullest

One after another,

A small miracle recorded in photo after photo;

Everything moves toward fulfillment

As custom and ceremony join hands

To do the honors,

Bidding in love and wildflowers

From the woods and the fields

For this short time in a quiet, thoughtful place.

After the rites and rituals--

World-changing, strangely brief--

They step out, solemnized, into the rest of their lives,

Onto grass dense to its tips with greenness,

Into an ancient shower of petals and seeds,

Spoken and unspoken wishes raining down;

Higher,

The air is filled with the ringing of bells

In accompaniment to their full inheritance,

The depths of joy

Stashed in the oldest details of our days.

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782 ELLICOTT STREET

BUFFALO 3, N.Y.

Slowly, over the years,

From Labor Day to Christmas,

Easter to Memorial Day,

The trees gave way to the sky--

We barely noticed

Above so many comings and goings,

The gradual thinning out,

The gentle dying down,

How less and less limbed shelter

Bent above our gatherings,

How the familiar shadows

The seasons cast across the lawn

Were growing thin and separate--

Now, returning, I'm completely lost

When I see sunlight falling unprevented

Flooding the street for the first time in a hundred years,

The asphalt slope as clear today

As it would have been that first bare year

When my great-grandfather, leaving behind

The rooms above the store on Genesee Street,

Seized the immigrant dream

And bought a house bigger than he needed.

Under the turn-of-the-century August sky,

He climbed the modest rise of his ambition,

Stocky, confident, and overdressed.

The trees were only hopeful saplings then

And the houses rows of bright new carpentry and brickwork

Going upwards in a litany of meaty German names:

Schultzes, Goetzes, Grabaus, Schunks.

He'd built a solid business out of trunks and coffins,

Earned a seat on the Mission Board,

Then a house with seven bedrooms,

A grand staircase, and double entrance doors

With oval windows that gathered green/plum/ruby light

In the profiles of Mozart and Longfellow,

Twin heros of the old world and the new,

Regarding each other through the years

In mild puzzlement.

"I am more in love with our new house every day,"

Wrote Theophile to his eldest daughter

That first summer, sounding like a girl himself,

Not the small, stern, watch-chained man

Held down by four black corners to the album page.

How he would nod in measured satisfaction now,

If he knew his house, alone

Of all the houses on the street, was spared,

Embraced by time instead of felled by it,

A Victorian Gem gone out to service in her old age,

A place of solace, good works, reproduction wallpaper,

And fundraiser teas in striped tents on the lawn.

It's been pulled straight, braced up,

Repainted in four authentic colors,

Declared officially charming by the Evening News,

Yet it's no longer the house that I remember

From a childhood on hands and knees--

Huge, shadowy, and faintly gritty,

Long, cold hallways mined with carpet tacks,

A Turkish cozy-corner tucked beneath the stairs,

High pantry cupboards fragrant with cookie tins.

(Though even after everyone was gone,

The smell of my grandmother's German baking

Lingered in the woodwork twenty years.)

And there's an unaccustomed gap beside the porch

Where the magnolia tree, dependably in glorious bloom,

Verified Easter Sunday morning

In generations of family photographs.

Such small essentials fell away somehow

As time drove up and down the hill

In every kind of car,

And then the entire neighborhood,

Leaving the house finally alone

With only memory lapping softly

At the small surviving lawn

As it grew reacquainted with the sky.

There's so much light on the street, now,

And so much empty air--

Yet the past is never truly over

Nor emptiness the only thing that's there.

There's something left of all our arrivals

In the gentle lift in the rise of the hill.

Memories linger and are what we bear

In the rhythm of homecoming

Worn like a path through time and thin air;

Template on template,

Everything happening over again

And all of us unaware--

Someone will plant the magnolia again,

In the same patch of light of another spring,

Because it's what flourishes there.

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