Bonedog - a poem by Eva Haralambidis-Doherty

Coming home is terrible
whether the dog licks your face or not
whether you have a wife or
just a wife-shaped loneliness 
waiting for you
coming home is terribly lonely
so that you'll think of the oppressive barometric pressure 
back where you've just come from 
with fondness, 
because everything is worse once you're home.

You think of the vermin clinging to the grass stalks, 
long hours on the road, roadside assistance and ice-creams, 
and the peculiar shapes of certain clouds 
and silences 
with longing because you did not want to return
coming home is 
just awful.

And the home-style silences and clouds contribute to nothing 
but the general malaise.

Clouds, such as they are, are in fact suspect
and made from different material than those you left behind
you yourself are cut from different cloudy cloth 
returned, remaindered, ill-met by moonlight, unhappy to be back, 
slack in all the wrong spots.
Seamy suit of clothes, dishrag-ratty, worn.

You return home, moon-landed, foreign
the earth's gravitational pull - an effort now redoubled, dragging your shoelaces
loose 
and your shoulders etching deeper 

the stanza of worry on your forehead.

You return home deepened, 
a parched well linked to tomorrow
by a frail strand of... 
anyway,
you sigh into the onslaught of identical days,
one might as well, at a time...
well, anyway,
you are back.

The sun goes up and down like a tired whore
the weather immobile like a broken limb while 
you just keep getting older
Nothing moves, but the shifting tides of salt in your body,
your vision blears, you carry your weather with you
the big, blue whale; a skeletal darkness.

You come back with an x-ray vision,
your eyes have become a hunger,
you come home with your mutant gifts
to a house of bone
everything you see now, all of it: bone.