This one speaks to me this morning…perhaps because I’m seriously considering moving/changing my life…simplifying…downsizing…Spring is here....Rebirth...

On Moving
Jane Huffman

Like butter, gone. I’m moving on, because it would be ludicrous to stay. It feels like a return (to sanity), although I’ve never been. (I’ve never lived a mile west of Illinois.) “I come home from the soaring,” Rilke wrote in The Inner Sky, which I take as imperative (omit the “I”): to ground, return to Earth, to grind the fable of my life down like orpiment into a yellow ash and tie my body to the floor. Rilke writes of God (“still roaring in my ears”) but God, for me (today) is fear. Goodbye to my deteriorating house. Delirium. I’m out the door. Stasis is a sieve through which I drag myself.

Literature feels / far away. Black bulls grazing / beyond a pale hill.

“This is one poem in a series of modified haibun, a Japanese poetic form originated by the seventeenth-century poet Matsuo Bashō and practiced by generations of poets to follow, to whom I owe thanks. The haibun is traditionally a travelogue poem that combines prose and haiku; my version transverses the inner and outer landscapes.”
—Jane Huffman

Jane Huffman
Jane Huffman is the author of Public Abstract (American Poetry Review, 2023), winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize. The recipient of a 2019 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, she is the founder and editor-in-chief of Guesthouse, an online literary journal.

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