'Rummaging Through a Life I Can No Longer Lead'

It puzzles me, whenever I return home from visiting the suburb of Cleveland where I grew up that I feel somehow disappointed. I’m not by nature an ungrateful person. I try to find the good in any experience and ignore the rest, but I’m nagged by the feeling that I missed something. I visit my brother, nephew, old friends and fondly remembered places. Last September, I attended my fifty-first high-school reunion and had good talks with people I haven’t seen in half a century. But something eluded me. Why is it not enough? Henry Taylor’s poem “Harvest” helps: 

“Every year in late July I come back to where I was raised,

to mosey and browse through old farm buildings,

over fields that seem never to change,

 

“rummaging through a life I can no longer lead

and still cannot leave behind, looking for relics

that might spring back to that life at my touch.”

 

Time and place have fused. Cleveland for me is 1959 or thereabouts, though the persistence of memory is not a willful act of nostalgia -- always an indulgence I resist. I haven’t lived there since 1977 and have no longing to live there again. I'm not trying to recapture some mythical vision of youth.

Taylor’s past is rural; mine, urban/suburban. Both are seductive. We were living at a good time in a good place and didn’t know it. Inevitably, much has changed. Returning is like those moments in dreams when we see someone we knew long ago but the shape of their face is suddenly octagonal or they’re speaking Polish – slight, disturbing alterations. As Taylor, who turned eighty this year, puts it, “time marches in a double column, double time.”

 

[Find “Harvest” in Taylor’s This Tilted World Is Where I Live: New and Selected Poems, 1962–2020 (Louisiana State University Press, 2020).]