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.
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