Flight night o the plane in morning and thru automated customs
trying to figure out again which one train will take us to the central
bus station where we can get the bus to old Watford where ancestors
lived back in time of Henry the VIII and leased land from him there
that once belonged to St. Albans abbey now become huge cathedral
and finally finding the train, then station, then bus and riding around
the rim of metro London looking, looking more like just sprawl that is
so familiar American sprawl, mix of rural and suburban, castles and
high rises, business and residential all mixed up this on that, that on
this ride streaming by the bus windows stopping to get o and to get
on and on passengers all quite certain where we are going but I am
still watching ever so closely even as the jet lag has the Jan nodding
out so I think we’re there three times before we actually get there and
where we got o the last time short walk up the street when the next
stop will be Watford Junction just past the Holiday Inn where we have
studio room reserved and have stayed twice before looking out over
from 8th floor the whole valley draining o toward the Thames River
and, of course, it would have been easier to stay on the bus one more
stop but I wasn’t sure it was a bus stop so there we were looking out
over the town on thursday now afternoon (still morning in the states
so after laying down a while (Jan asleep) I just have to go out to see
what’s still there past Sainsbury groceries and right by various Italian
pizza and Asian food operations and straight over the bridge on way
to Cassowary Park former estate of some local Lord now public park
going right back long rows of hundreds of years old trees mile & half
across a bridge over the creek cum canal with locks and then into the
woods that come out finally way, way back in there in a winding golf
course I found the last time but this time far from empty Cassowary
Park is overflowing with people just like the strip was downtown that
now fully pedestrian mall that’s been made out of the old still standing
structures to which they’ve added a 5 or a 6 story retail indoor center
across the street from where St. Mary’s (where ancestors were buried)
still lurks behind Nemo’s coee and a pizza joint but way back out in
Cassowary Park there’s even more people than there was downtown
and in between is a giant beachlet of sand for the kids to play in but
even more kids are playing in the wading and swimming pools about
half way down to the to the canal where there’s even more kids who
are wading in the spill water from the old dam and people are walking
everywhere over the old stone bridge and way back into the old woods
and who only know their numbers were driving them all the way on to
the golf course, too, and even I can’t believe it one of the canal boats
with a woman at the helm is in the lock with water flowing out as she
is slowly lowered right on down to new level and the gates are opened
for her by pure human physical force and the boat edges out into flow
of the current downstream so I remember MOM whose ancestors once
lived here and how her favorite most loved activity was watching boats
go through locks: meditation on water and gravity (oh so far from
          home).

 

James Van Looy has been a fixture in Boston’s poetry venues since the 1970s. He is a member of Cosmic Spelunker Theater and has run poetry workshops for Boston area homeless people at Pine Street Inn and St. Francis House since 1992. Van Looy leads the Labyrinth Creative Movement Workshop, which his Labyrinth titled poems are based on. His work appears weekly in Oddball Magazine.