8-16-2013

All those kids, tattooed tourists
With their loud, crowded miles.
There's room for them in your kitchen,
Your yard, still holding
The constellations,
Your songbook
Brimming over with jungle fire.

At some point, there are grandchildren,
And the neck remembers with
Tenderness the way the routes out
From underneath summer storm warnings
Blossomed
Into all those Milky Way baths,

And the shake and the shudder
Shook the candy of the earth's crust
Off the remnants of you that mattered.

And the road
The road
The road bends west. It bends west,
A puzzle solved always to that answer,
A distance figured always to that measure.

What better answer will you stand and give to all those asking
Evenings,
Alone or otherwise,
When the reeds bow down along the angle of the wheel-rush?

None.

The grace of each curve
Answers itself.