County Road

I know I've been here in this afternoon 4: 10 P.M. Like lubricated clockworks in a perpetual machine My life returns to this brown earth blue sky Pressed in between the distance And the silence and the cries of crows Who gather, circle, and grow louder In the rising dusk. This is how it has been, is, will always be. This red clay bank where the road was carved Has risen here forever. That old capped well has always dripped and echoed In the plunging darkness And the far-off crack that is cicadas breaking from their skins, These things have always been in motion. That path that disappears just there between the trees Leads now, as ever, to a grand but faded house Drowsing in the humming shade, Where my father's fathers lived and died, Lay open eyed and wide awake Through first bird sounds and whipporwhills As grey ascended into daylight once again And just as always far too soon. A place where lost boys raged And beat their hands against closed doors, Is this my road, these shaded woods, This certain path the only map that I can read? Sometimes in the small hours even now I think I hear the pounding of my father's desperate hands On doors locked, bolted, and immune, The ringing of his secret wars Down darkened, pine floored corridors Where secrets are piled thick upon each other. The only sound I hear now on this narrow road Is wind that hisses in the branches In sharp swift gusts from long ago Standing now beneath those branches, Owning no locked door to pound upon, I wonder why my clenched and aching hands Are bleeding. Thunder rolls and rumbles, Distant in the fading afternoon.