On What Winds and Walls Do I Yet Wait
“Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out”
— Robert Frost
There’s something in some summer days that beg
the long route home. I never have my boys
on Father’s Day and the phone was busy sleeping in
the aftermath of a longer night than most
in solitude.
I drove.
I veered aside—
Old Frankfort Pike was the only thing
calling.
***
My jeep jostled and juddered along
the winding road through horse farms.
Cows stood stock still, knee-deep
in stagnant, muddy pond water. They stared
blankly ahead. A little farther along, white and black
figures strewn across green pastures like post-apocalyptic
corpses after the war. But closer up, I saw
they were merely sheep napping in the humid heat
of the day. They couldn’t bother
as if knowing where I was
headed—
I entered the tunnel:
***
In the Fall, grey pavement stretches
ahead like a cold, hard river
beneath skeletal branches bowing,
exhausted, forehead against forehead, hanging
over your vehicle as it crawls
through empty, blasted fields.
But this is Summer, or at least late
Spring, a later Spring than usual
due to spasmodic rain and snow
and sleet and Braxton-Hicks thaws
leaving the womb of the city
fallow. I missed my boys. I longed
for the other who’d been silent
all night and all morning. I felt
the steadily-more-stoic crush of loneliness
and was expecting the silence
to which I was growing
accustomed.
And then I entered the 800-foot length
of road overseen by stacked-rock fences.
It was my favorite part of the path. I recalled
as I always recalled, the first time I passed them:
My father was driving us to Lexington
to see the release of Willow, the first true fantasy
on the big screen of my childhood. There was
Hope and brighter expectation
and a lesson. He explained, as he drove,
how the Civilian Conservation Corps had piled
stone atop stone in the 1930s, in relative silence,
toiling, whether seen or unseen, during
the Great Depression (an ominous name, though
I wouldn’t understand its implications, either
time period or metaphorically, for decades).
***
Recent weeks have been hard.
So very much possibility and potential buried
beneath so very many trials and pitfalls
of Faith. Until, one night, two weeks ago,
when I heard the voice I hadn’t heard
for three decades: One that promised
an end to having to fight another day.
I felt it moving, again, rustling,
as my jeep crawled between the ruins
of those fences, the slow, hypnotic crackle
of smooth scales sliding across smooth scales,
oily black and sinuous, inexorably twisting,
without a single identifiable head or tail
or an end
that might please
Terminus.
***
Last year, Kentucky was blasted
by three consecutive storms. Winds
that exceeded 90 miles per hour
and screamed straight lines
through trees, roofs, and fences,
and that was only the first
leaving devastation of a year
that heralded far worse.
The beauty of Old Frankfort Pike
had suffered. My fences lay halfway
in rubble like broken teeth
laid and left out for a black rider
someone had once called a fairy,
not knowing she liked to sleep
with one paler.
I thought, then, of Frost. Both his
Good fences make good neighbors
and his woods so lovely dark and deep
a rider stops by on a snowy evening
and contemplates an end
to his journey.
In an instant, without pausing, without stopping
without thinking, I pressed my foot
harder
against the gas.
***
There’s something some summer days beg
of a man. A father. A lover. A Poet, whether
anyone sees the warrior inside or not. Something
that calls him to greener spaces and longer
roads home. Something that shakes its head
like nickering horses let loose from the stables,
chasing incessantly buzzing flies from their manes
before they can settle.
There is an ocean I’ve yet to swim
near a cave I’ve yet to crawl
with a woman I’ve yet to wed
in a country I’ve yet to see.
There are children I’ve yet to hold
and others I’ve yet to release
and an end that defies both fire and ice
no matter how much hate
or misled passion
whispers of the past.
And I do have promises to keep
and a life to live before I sleep
and I am old enough to recognize
I owe seeing it all to no one as much
as I owe it
to myself.
*To my Dad, and all the other men struggling out there in relative silence and amid the reality of a today*
