House on Granny White Pike
Standing by the street,
I saw that house again
after phantom fleeting years.
Decades of change
have washed across this land
like restless ocean tides,
wresting sculptures of sand away.
Yet this time-spared home
still looks the same.
I grew up here,
spending my youth
among trimmed hedges and trees,
like a vagrant weed
in such a sheltered garden.
Sitting in its shade,
I played the endless games
of childhood's feckless fancy.
Each summer day
grew hot and long
with buzzing crickets'
song and sounds
of beating wings.
Winter rains and dark
raced on
to colder climes,
made stark or grayed.
In those dusky days,
ceaseless seasons
lingered or slept
as if made to stay
till even time
evaporated
into air.
I moved away,
afraid to wait
for endless dawns
by a forest lost,
where long-cast shadows
arrested hours.
Along my later restless way
my seasons
slipped off soundless
to a far-gone place
and quietly they ceased.
Weeks and years
droned on.
They betrayed me,
fooling my fettered hours
like a broken clock.
My foot-ways
lumbered forward, listless,
toward hard-fastened limits
on my life.
Sameness
dulled my senses,
shutting out
the sun-made rhymes
of passing dark and light.
Soon I lost careless sight
of any road
where I could flee
or freely wander far.
My pathways ended
at a vine-encrusted cul-de-sac.
Detrius surrounded
and piled high about me.
I shouted,
"Here is the true
but woeful pay
for numb, near-endless labor."
No one heard
nor dreamed or dared
approach me there.
I fell to earth,
so closed-in, cast away
and left behind.
Like a sparrow
seeking warmer climes
but finding sleet instead,
I froze.
My taxidermy-like
repose in my trusted roost,
found only cold.
Ice-wrought fingers caught,
encased and crushed me
with crystal claws.
I found no life,
but only snares
with a lone and rigid hold
far worse than winter.
I only want to see
October again.
Memories of amber woods
and ancient red-stained
leafy trees, far-reaching,
surround
that house
on Granny White.
Recalling child-play sounds
and smelling smoke,
still I see grace-painted
sunsets seared,
as if by branding flame.
All of these
far-wandered falls
ache within me.
I remember times
when I lay with those I loved
on heaps of dying leaves.
We stared
into a deep and dazzling
blue-soaked sky
impossible to touch.
We stayed
and didn't dare to move
till day turned dark.
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