Monday, June 6, 2011

name in stone.


i come from a family of gravediggers and morticians. when my dad &his twin brother were small they had to ride around in hearses and saw the dead and things like these. and things like these have always been a part of my history and my family's history and the way (i think the way we all feel) we move our own from this reality to the next. i hear these stories on and off and ever since i was very small i have gone to the cemeteries my family used to own

and my father gets frustrated about all of the earth and the parts of history that my family has given away piece by piece. i always want to write about these things, and i guess in part i do. the same things in my mind that form picture on picture between that vibrant and green reality, those sad oaks and willows bending to the ground, the crooked trees i used to hide beneath, are the same things that hideaway the ghosts and movable things that build homes in my dreams and memories. and lately, at least for the past month, these spaces have become even more exasperating. the things i imagine are so real, the things that keep their shapes for so very long and the shadows seem to move before i can set them as something else on the other side of my skull. the world i know is completely separate from the world i imagine to be so. peeling these parts away from me is no easy thing. and it is not just me.


yesterday i went to the beach. and we rode past that old and festering pink hotel on st petersburg beach and my friend said it was pretty and she wanted to stay and things like these. and i told her my parent's swore it was haunted, and she and i made up stories about how to swindle a person with ghosts and all of these things were very funny, indeed and then later later later in the evening we went to my parent's house for dinner and my father asked my friend about the beach and the don cesar and all the haunted stories of my mother and father's trip let everything very wide-eyed and eerie and very real. there are other fables like these other haunts about where i grew up and all of the things and people that were here before, the beautiful french hens  and baby chicks nick and i used to take to school and all the animals gone and buried in our cemetery, which is now a garden, and makes me very nervous to dig in to. i guess the point is that i am not a very grave person, but that these things are very one in the same to me.

2 comments:

Mike said...

love the way this was written. those sad oaks and willows bending to the ground, the crooked trees i used to hide beneath, & things like these

kristenclanton.com said...

thank you :)