This poem is written for Anna Kanopka, who spent 10 years in exile hiding out in the Yukon Territory from the US Coast Guard.




Leads You Here Despite Your Destination

She's manifested today like a ghost
appearing from a haunted house.
Desertion is that inhabited manor
from which the voices in her head
urge her into exile, urge her phantom existence.
Sitting upon the berm overlooking
the beach and lighthouse of Coos Bay,
she wishes she could ride the setting
Pacific sun to New Guinea or beyond.
Below five athletic young women
contest the physics of a soccer ball,
imagining the red-white lighthouse a goal.
In other times she'd ask to join them,
but she must lose her personal history now,
remain hidden in plain sight.
The loneliness of this subsistence
a charnel house blackening her heart.
She's Amelia Earhart about to crash
the Yukon's heartbroken cry.



Poetry by Brian Oarr
Read 529 times
Written on 2010-03-05 at 04:28

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In both Mojave Comfort Fire and this poem you evoke time and place, giving your themes, the people that populate your poems, both reality and a kind of other-worldliness. It is very effective, the poems have a story-tellers rhythm to them, almost mythical.

Cheers,
jim

Do you know the book "The Sea Runners" by Ivan Doig? It came to mind when reading this poem.
2010-03-05