I’ll start with the easier one. Home Again Home Again by A. F. Moritz describes a person at a comfortable remove from his mother (and father); they’ve become “unchanging,” part of a “long slow time.”

So father, mother, the small shabby town,
its patch of earth going on as though forever: you
forgot them there, where they’d been since you started out
and where you could find them again — as anyone
forgets what he has to lean on
so deeply and heavily that it wounds his side
and the pain seems only himself.

His life isn’t about them anymore; it’s about him. They exist only as the past he “lean[s] on / so deeply and heavily” that he feels it simply as his own present reality – “only himself.” He has accomplished a sort of full absorption of his parents into himself, so that they themselves, as flesh and blood people existing in a specific history, are forgotten.

He lives with this attitude toward them happily enough, until one day he wakes up feeling guilty, ungrateful, as though he’s crushed them in their human particularity for the sake of his own selfish being in the world. So he travels back to their old shabby town in an effort to remember them, to as it were reanimate them, give them their due.

The buildings had leaned still farther
toward the dusty weeds and crumbs of old machines
littered everywhere inexplicably. And now
who will explain them?

The scene is one of enigma and abandon, a ruined post-industrial landscape that can’t explain itself because no one who lived it is alive. People – his parents – had worked here, worked hard, for themselves and for their children. But the meaning of it all – the human motive of it – remains inexplicable.

And check the records:
what is written down says nothing.
The volumes all avoid the one question you have.
They’re like the notebooks you kept in adolescence:
you turn the endless pages and you wonder,
what did I know or feel, how did I live then,
what was this violence and love, this utter newness,
invention that could sing water and light, raging
at the first touch of dying, never mentioning death?
You went back and the bones of your native town
were like that, records from which something had escaped:
a skeletal mill that roofed ghostly technologies
where men once worked, coughed, burnt, bled.

History books don’t help, because they don’t tell you what you’ve come to find out, which is what our deepest, most alive, impulses mean. Returning to the town is like rereading your adolescent journals. In both cases, you just don’t get it. You see ruins of youth, so this means there must have been youth. You see skeletons, smudged marks, faded papers of youth and industry and intensity, now-dead locations where once a certain hyperactivity prevailed:

violence and love
invention that could sing water and light, raging
at the first touch of dying, never mentioning death

But what was this frenzy? What was its cause? Where did it go?

And that way they had permitted the long pageants
of the children. And their mothers — whose images,
vague, identical, stalk by in the nights,
each one sorrowing and serene, her starved, enamelled,
hard flesh torn, her dress the blue of late dusk,
the heaven behind her a work of flat blinding gold.

Well, they worked like dogs for their children, to permit their long pageants, their happy lives. Children who now, like the speaker of the poem (notice that his “you” gradually slides into “I”), find their dreams stalked by iconic sacrificing mother images – mothers who starved themselves into early deaths (blue of late dusk) in order to “work” a golden heaven for their children.

And that was the personally “inexplicable” vibrancy of the adolescent poet himself; it was a pageant purchased for him by the ghostly industry of his father and mother.

Poem #2 coming up.