The Road Home

In the Spring of 1972A tan Volkswagen with a fish-tailed fastbackTurned at the Red StarWhere the gas station had decayed into razed landThe ancient grass piercing the crumbled wreckageCracked, disintegratedWithin time’s ruthless surge.The child is father of the man.The Black descendants of CherokeesTracked the fissured cementBeyond the abandoned frontsAluminum sheets paused by the red sign.The brick dorm lies just up the paved hill.The spirits of eagles perched there onceTheir voices still whisper in the sacred wind.Balding old manYour light-skinned head as smooth as an eggPolished gemstone in snowy winterThe cool cat that strayed from the hunt of a mouseTo seek an ancestral grail.Silver Historian greater than this rhyme.In time I have returned to thee in the withered CaneLooking for a flower whose magicWas lost to the future, now restored to the past.Charles, did you know Cassandra?The bemusing smile from your splintered deskThe anvil-shaped rostrum banished to the floorToward the sun beyond the window.You illuminated a distant pathWe saw the clock on the far wall.Hanging in rounded space.Twenty years laterAncient edifices laced with moist mortarBoth poetry and campusare incredibly changed.Once a comet streaked the skyNever to burst on the horizon againYour music plays on.Siren of a higher orderkinder, gentler songThe pianist’s weary blues.Robust old man with the Cheshire grinYou tricked oblivion.Hurling no great text into the vortexNo sacrifice for the temporal windWhere turbo electrics flicker on the screenStreaming faster now than 70 on Interstate 40Toward a Long Day’s Journey into Night.Durham Road, take me home.Durham Road, take me home.It’s been far too long I been gone.In 1988, I thanked you for my literary birthThe umbilical of the father to the academic sonTwenty years earlier a hatched chickWaters washed from new wingsIcarus primed for a fall.The child is father of the man.“When you were a sophomore, you read Wordsworthand you have never been the same.”Amen, Dear Charles, Amen