Striding home for lunch at sixteen
a line of poetry repeating in my head;
the brisk November sky had nothing
on the power of the word unfolding
in my life at that precise instant.
All I wanted to do was be home with pen
and paper to write it down, just get it.
The brown grass of the neighbor’s yard
took forever to cross; then the street,
it’s fresh coat of tar and asphalt became
a Mississippi barring an undiscovered
world from my nascent explorations.
Dad, not yet diagnosed, sat smoking
in the driveway. “Fine, fine,”
I muttered in reply, waving off
his promise of lunch waiting inside.
And what was the line that drove me
with such harried import from school
across vacant lots, past my father
with such adolescent disregard?
That I cannot tell you thirty six years later:
for nothing, not even a phrase remains
from that line from that day, nothing;
nothing but the urgent walk home
through the brisk-blue November air.
(June 2010)
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