To find the road that leads back to home—
if not in a dream, then maybe at dawn
from a dormer window and memory
as sharp as arrowheads found by a stream
and crisp as our sun-dried sheets—that clean,
and fragrant as acres of fresh cut lawn.
To leave for home quickly, nighttime or day,
in August or spring. But only if
it still exists near a pioneer wood
where willow and elm and sycamore stood
that breathed soft like the First Nations would
and sang us to sleep with the crickets.
To pack and set off into a fog
at midnight. To vanish and be reborn
by a pasture that brims with Queen Anne’s lace
that pollinates my dreams and my face.
To murmurs from all the roots of that place
and a train that rattles our bed with its horn.
To home. To a summer when childhood fills
and bursts glasses and then overflows
high as two girls who pump an old swing
and with their father’s harmonica sing
and muffle their laughter under bed sheets.
And sorrow isn’t born yet to know.
To evening deep as obsidian stone
’til fire flies light it. Back to our home
the night the alien Sputnik appears,
crosses the sky in our window and veers
to a future our parents grew to fear.
But where is the path, which way to home
when the map denies that it exists
and the road outside leads only to mist?
