This Took Way Too Long

So sometimes I just get stuck. I wrote about 95 percent of this poem about 7 days ago and I've been trying to write an ending for it ever since. And so in the meantime, I kept tweaking it, cutting and changing the body of it. I really should have saved multiple drafts of this but I just finally settled on this sort of first draft. Ending? Hmm. Not sure yet. I don't want it to get too expository and I don't want it to be a list of things either. But I also don't know if copping to what is going on too early is taking some of the punch out.

Hmm. I really missed workshops this week. In a way, it's taken me a little while to settle down after workshops and get back to writing what I want. So I'm glad to be done in a way. But there's the little nitpicky questions that you can't bother people with outside of a workshop. But here's this and I have a few others to post. I just wanted to get this one out first. Unfortunately, some of the spacing doesn't translate into blogs.

Because I Couldn’t Yoke Your Memory to Me

The day we left that duplex,
I kifed the address off the mailbox
so people would doubt the house.
I began this for you,
for not rescuing you, to turn the earth backwards.
And when I pedaled by the next hundred afternoons,
I’d throw a handful of salt into every square of yard.
Until the grass and grow made exit, until I saw vanishing
possible and all the next two decades I erased.
Somethings gradual, like termites, like drowning the spring
come worms and then their children, and then every cousin-
great-grandchild of every worm we knew
when you and I summered here.
So forth with birds, so forth with squirrels-
and still more for you.
When I had a car, I arsened that rotten estate.
When I had a bulldozer, I pushed its bones into the open
basement and scraped the ground flat as a Kansas plain.
I chopped up the driveway, rolled back the avenue,
evicted the neighbors and chased them all, wee wee wee, into new homes.
Then I slow poisoned the water table until the town
got up like offended party guests.
So emptied, a Vesuvius of silence
our childhood cicadas were revealed
so them, too I squelched in their dreams.
I’ve hidden you
from this blanked burial ground, our blind city.
I peeled away all highways, rerouted to towns of our lesser memories,
blurred the atlases and records, arranged the hills unrecognizable,
stoned myself that these means justify this ending:
one day, you, by some fate, wander back
and stop to wonder at some ghost of sadness,
but (if I was thorough enough)
your eyes would register nothing of our old home,
perhaps you might wonder for a time if this place
ever happened to you.
For that reprieve, I’d destroy anything beautiful.