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i thought i'd do my poem posting a little differently here at the Hangar. i'll give a little background on the pieces i post here...a little explanitory note as it were, to tell a bit about where my head was at when i wrote the piece.
all of the pieces written about kentucky were written after i moved, in 1990, to san francisco. it was only from 3000 miles away that i could get any kind of perspective on my life in kentucky. 20/20 hindsight and all that. this particular piece was an admission to myself that there are things that, having been born there, i could not discard about kentucky, things that make me intrinsically kentuckian. southern. things i don't wish, after distance and reflection, to discard. no matter who i am, what hats i chose to wear, where i live, i will always be from kentucky. there IS beauty there. i keep it with me now.
Up Home
I turned a blind eye to the dogwood once,
refused the forsythia,
ignored the rise and swell
of the South Elkhorn Branch beneath me
and crawled across the Sierras
on my belly, like a snake out of Eden,
looking for my ninth life,
looking for a country without winter but,
hold steady old brick, I have come back to haunt you.
I stand, inexorable, on the road between your slave walls
singing Power in the Blood, Power in the Blood.
The Cherokee would not leave their dead
between the Ohio River and the Great Smoky Mountains
but parts of me are heaped and buried in mounds and covered over in Bluegrass.
My father knew the low whistle of the late night L & N and taught me to listen for it,
taught me to put my hands on the rail and my ear to the ground
and wait for the humming in my bones.
This is the sound that will bring you home, he said,
memorize the words and sing it when you miss me.
Hold steady old brick,
it’s bad luck to kill a cricket you find
chirping in your own house.
I am your summer child,
made to bloom in those hills the Cherokee call The Dark and Bloody Ground,
made to mine the black caves of your limestone heart and come out shining.
My mother knew the stars in your indifferent heavens and taught me to name them,
taught me to watch them until I could make them move.
When you look at the sun and I look at the moon
we are seeing the same light, she said, you have my eyes.
Hold steady old brick, your borders are not fixed.
I stretch them out along the Pacific Rim and they
pull me back again and again, home to roost
in your rusting box gutters.
<i>Edited by: danlo60 at: 7/9/06 2:11 pm
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