The first poem I wrote
after the long night of fifteen year's drinking
was about my grandmother's hands,
how they reached toward me, comforted
me in the cool hours of early childhood
when I awoke often to the sound of Grandpa
coming through the kitchen door, carrying
an aluminum pail of warm milk. Which Grandma
poured over ice, and I drank the creamy sweetness
as her pale blue-veined hands kneaded
dough for biscuits. It all comes back now,
the rush of memory like a flight of small birds
I surprised last night near the hibiscus tree--
the thrum of their rising a mercy, a reminder
of a world that has long surrendered
but manages to sneak back
on quick wings, messengers calling us
toward a deeper life, a time when we lived
closer to the world of the blacksnake hiding
in the cold dairy barn, eyes full of winter
in early spring easing down from hay bales,
ignored by my grandfather who tends to
his pregnant cow that kicks against the grey stall.
But my eyes follow the snake as it scrawls
a journey across the mildewed straw, tongue
slipping out, seeking meaning in this new
world that has emerged from ice and dawn
burning through chinks in barn walls. Somewhere
deep in the corner of my age and alcohol addled brain,
March 1959 is putting on its glory coat
and the Virginia sun is rising over
the easterly scud that will fade down into
the pine tree tops. I sling the barn door open
and walk the red mud path that leads back
to the kitchen where breakfast will be ready soon.
Now, I'm passing the henhouse, the windmill,
and the woodshed where a John Deere tractor
rises from shadow, big tires haloed in
first light raining down its dazzling miracle
over the nicked and rusted green body
of Nottoway County forests and fields
shimmering in a dawn forty years ago
where swallows rise from barn eaves,
dark bodies fluttering off into
the woods that are still pitch black,
still holding on to the night,
as I climb the creaking back porch stairs,
open the kitchen door to a room yellowed
by a cackling woodstove, its mouth
open like a lost moon.
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