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TROY'S PLACE

 

I had been out to see Troy on his farm once before, on a hot Saturday afternoon last summer when, like today, he turned out to not be home. But today in December I knew he was moving, just a few miles down the road, and after knocking stepped into a room nearly empty save for some groceries and dishes. The whole farm is for sale, the barns and owner's trailer across the yard also empty for weeks, the silence deep in the late raking sun. "A poem begins with a lump in the throat, a homesickness or a love sickness" the card read, words by Robert Frost typed on an old typewriter with hiccups, and taped now to a cupboard door above the kitchen sink. I thought of Troy's tall self reading these words every day at eye-level before he went out to feed the animals, or its continuance as he made dinner: "It is a reaching out towards expression, an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought, and the thought has found the words." I see him getting a glass of water before bed and falling asleep to the sounds of horses murmuring and occasionally kicking their stalls: "My definition of poetry (if I were forced to give one) would be this: words that have become deeds." There are huge flocks of geese that come to the area in fall, and as I drove home at sunset I watched as they honked their ragged formations across the sky, when I started to picture Troy typing that card in hiccups, and all of a sudden some idea came to them, the geese, and they all lined up perfectly, definitely, heading west, their voice full, their complete thought high.

 

Jack Balas
12-15-2014