Home Again

I've been away for a week with my family in SW Georgia, for my uncle's funeral. The drive down in summer always makes me think again about how strong the call of home is. And the drive back to the mountains sings home to me just as strongly as heading south does. This is a poem I began years ago on one of those summer drives home to the farm where I was raised.


Coastal Plain

The only clouds
forming are crow clouds,

the only shade, oaks
bound together in a tangle of oak

limbs that signal the wind
coming, if there is any wind

stroking the flat
fields, the flat

swatch of corn.
Far as anyone’s eye can see, corn’s

dying under the sky
that repeats itself either as sky

or as water
that won’t remain water

for long on the highway: its shimmer
is merely the shimmer

of one more illusion that yields
to our crossing as we ourselves yield

to our lives, to the roots
of our landscape. Pull up the roots

and what do we see but the night
soil of dream, the night

soil of what we callhome.
Home that calls

and calls
and calls.

from Coming to Rest, LSU Press, 2006