Heart & shod hooves, strange disembarking from the Arafura Sea onto familiar

land, after a year-long journey through the hazards of daily life via language &

imagination, but what hits one after the adventure, & return home, is exactly the

question of the homeless & the uncanny, the unheimlich, as described by Freud

in his study of aesthetics, the idea that that which frightens us by its unfamiliarity

by further examination leads back to what is old & familiar. As I say, it’s strange

returning home only to be struck most by the unhomely, & most specifically the

homeless. Surely, travel presents aspects of homelessness: not always having a

place to stay for the night, no bed, no shower, & suddenly I recall a Thanksgiving

out on the streets in Cambridge with the most homeless of the homeless. The

uncanny is everything that ought to have remained secret & hidden, but has come

to light. When I saw the man walking up Forest Avenue, he may well have been

naked in his pain, his tolerance for pain so far beyond my own, his courage there,

stripped bare. I can’t get over the grim visages of all those outside the soup

kitchen on Preble Street. As I reflect over the extraordinary year covered by this

journey in Time, the old regime soon banished to exposure & shame, our first

black president should turn things upside-down & begin by radically changing

NASA’s role & priorities from celestial space to space here on earth, to finding

innovative ways to house the homeless. It reminds me of the week when they

placed a detention cell similar to those used at Guantanemo up on Congress,

where passersby looked in only to find accommodations, clean bed, sink, toilet,

far superior to those for many on the street. Not knowing where you’re going in a

poem carries with it similar aspects of the uncanny. In that sense, I don’t know

whether this return home may even be another leaping-off point for a journey,

who knows where?