“There’s the house I left for good / (if forever can ever be good),”
From “Sea Level” by Stephen Dunn
Dunn’s lines, unadorned, have put me in a state of reverie. What are the chances I’ll ever revisit Sheffield Ct. (the house I grew up in)? Or Carriage Stop (the apartment complex before that)? Or Belmondo or Maplevale Dr.? Places I’ve left for good. Places where the doors unlocked at the end of a workday, where cars were shoveled out from snow, where the grass was mowed on summer days, or where my daughter learned to ride a bike. Sometimes, I drive by the house on Maplevale when I’m in town or I’ll park in the old neighborhood and walk along the canal path towards town.
Early in our relationship, I showed my ex-wife where I grew up. At a different time, we drove by an apartment complex in New Jersey where she had lived (briefly). Because her mother still lived in the house where my ex grew up – we visited there often. In a different relationship, my girlfriend and I stopped at Sheffield Ct. We parked in the center part of the cul-de-sac where the extra cars park. We walked through the woods where I used to play. We went to the pond where I used to fish. When we visited San Diego, I saw the house where she and her husband lived – the one she was proud to have fixed up on her own before moving to Philly. I saw her elementary school (painted yellow if I recall) and the swing sets and playgrounds with their ocean views.
I’m thinking about the innocence of those moments and that type of sharing – the attempts at opening a window into who we used to be and how we used to frolic. Dunn’s poem continues, “… I’ve come to visit / the friends who’ve stayed / casualty’s course – the dearest ones.” and later, “I pull into their driveway, wanting / to tell them how it feels to have – / for the first time – an undivided heart, / a sudden purity of motive,” but of course, he realizes he doesn’t have an undivided heart. While some of us actively hide and most of us simply forget, our allegiances to our past are not so hard to stir – our hearts not so difficult to divide.