EVA H.D. POET EXTRAORDINAIRE

BY: Georgia Davis

There is one scene everyone is talking about in Charlie Kaufman’s unusual adaptation of I’m Thinking of Ending Things — and it’s not the scene you would expect. In it, the main character with an ever-changing first name (played by Jessie Buckley) recites a poem she claims is hers but we later find out is by Eva H.D. 

The poem “Bonedog” is a captivating poem with a sturdy cadence. It’s dripped in melancholic language that evokes so much emotion in every stanza. Kaufman and Eva H.D. are friends in real life, so it was a no brainer for the artistic director to choose her poem. Her collection of poems Rotten Perfect Mouth can even be found in the movie. Thank you, Kaufman, for introducing us to Eva H.D. Read the full poem below and marvel in its syntax.

Bonedog by Eva H.D.

Coming home is terrible

whether the dogs lick your face or not;

whether you have a wife

or just a wife-shaped loneliness waiting for you.

Coming home is terribly lonely,

so that you think

of the oppressive barometric pressure

back where you have just come from

with fondness,

because everything’s worse

once you’re home.

 

You think of the vermin

clinging to the grass stalks,

long hours on the road,

roadside assistance and ice creams,

and the peculiar shapes of

certain clouds and silences

with longing because you did not want to return.

Coming home is

just awful.

 

And the home-style silences and clouds

contribute to nothing

but the general malaise.

Clouds, such as they are,

are in fact suspect,

and made from a different material

than those you left behind.

You yourself were cut

from a different cloudy cloth,

returned,

remaindered,

ill-met by moonlight,

unhappy to be back,

slack in all the wrong spots,

seamy suit of clothes

dishrag-ratty, worn.

 

You return home

moon-landed, foreign;

the Earth’s gravitational pull

an effort now redoubled,

dragging your shoelaces loose

and your shoulders

etching deeper the stanza

of worry on your forehead.

You return home deepened,

a parched well linked to tomorrow

by a frail strand of…

 

Anyway . . .

 

You sigh into the onslaught of identical days.

One might as well, at a time . . .

 

Well . . .

Anyway . . .

You’re back.

 

The sun goes up and down

like a tired whore,

the weather immobile

like a broken limb

while you just keep getting older.

Nothing moves but

the shifting tides of salt in your body.

Your vision blears.

You carry your weather with you,

the big blue whale,

a skeletal darkness.

 

You come back

with X-ray vision.

Your eyes have become a hunger.

You come home with your mutant gifts

to a house of bone.

Everything you see now,

all of it: bone.