It seems that I’m always moving, leaving one place behind to begin again at another. Some moves have been over international borders, sometimes even oceans, others a few blocks into a new part of a neighborhood. I’ve left cities, countries, cultures, and languages behind. Forgotten to pack a piece of art or a box of kitchen supplies. Forgotten small things and large. Forgotten to leave a forwarding address or a number. Sometimes directions. Once, I left home (Regina, Saskatchewan at the time) to move to a university in the U.S. and accidentally ended up heading west for an hour before realizing I was going the wrong way.

As we get older, we tend to accumulate more things and the prospect of moving becomes less appealing. For me, it’s been books. Perhaps it was fated to be this way. My father, a professional librarian and archivist by day and family historian by night. My mother, a worker at the university library. Even my paternal uncle, a non-fiction writer and used book dealer. Books are in the blood. Growing up, our house was always full of books. Old books. Obscure things culled from used bookstores or picked up in our lifetime of moving from one place to another. When I left home to pursue my undergraduate degree in the U.S. I took with me only a small set of reading materials. Now, a career and one-and-half graduate degrees later, I have amassed a rather substantial collection of 650 books, mostly poetry. Needless to say, each move I’ve undertaken has become more challenging than the last as that body of books grows.

Still, there are some strange rewards to moving. You can develop a real delight in packing books tightly, fitting them perfectly into boxes. Something like advanced Tetris. You consider shapes and widths. You determine where to align the spines so as to keep the books in good condition. You learn interesting tricks, like leaving spaces which can be filled with crumpled paper to absorb shock and still hold things in place. In packing that many books, you need a lot of packing paper. During the last big move from Canada to the U.S., I used old drafts of my poetry manuscript to fill the cracks and spaces between books. Poetry to pack poetry.

Over the years, I’ve fallen in love with moving. There’s a need within me to let things go. To make an accounting and appraisal of what I’ve accumulated. To give up or keep or give away to someone else who has a greater need for that thing. But beyond the packing, beyond the loading of the truck (another exercise in precision and compression, the rightness of fit), there is the simple joy of being between places with all your worldly goods tucked away in small containers, traveling with you. In these moments, you are between existences. Ungrounded. Unfettered by place. On the verge of creating something, even as you leave an empty space behind. When you arrive the world must begin, real life must continue, bills be paid, responsibilities be acted upon, broken things discarded, problems dealt with. But for these few minutes, hours, or days on the road, everything exists as possibility, as the pristine unmarked future. And moving somehow becomes like writing a poem, a stepping off into the unknown with the hope of a surprise, of a turn that takes you at last through the unknown world to a place that perhaps you’ve never seen before that somehow feels like home.

Fittingly, I’ll close with a poem about moving from my first book of poetry, The Lost Country of Sight.

In the Long Dream of Exile

You are counting the dark exit of crows
in the rear view mirror, or from the top of an overpass
looking back into the last flames of cloud.
Your car, steel to the world of flint, rests listless
with its windows wide, the stars slipping in
and settling down for the night.
Now, what you could not leave rides in boxes
heavy with numbers and places you’ve already
turned into poems. There is nothing left
in your pockets, your clothes worn down
to this list of miles taking you out of the known earth.
Outside your open window, the dark repeats
like the wind in late fall, twisting the names
of familiar back roads into a long rope of sighs.
You could lower yourself down with such longing.
It could be a woman or a young girl, the way the light
clings to that body like a sheet of immaculate heat,
invisible to the eye, but something, you are certain,
something that must be on the verge of love.