Trying to Get Home  
           
“An aged man is but a paltry thing/unless soul flap its wings/and sing”
- W.B. Yeats

The third cup of coffee doesn’t help the rain-delay 
in my brain, my body is like that half buried log 
I once tried to lift out of the ooze.  It shifted
with a sucking noise, branches snapped off, 
rotted bark sloughed away and too late
I realized it would never catch fire.
   But I have to go home.  Which means fielding 
family goodbyes and a taxi ride to the airport-- this is Atlanta 
where April breathes the full green Word-- and now somehow 
it is Detroit and I 94, lined with forlorn trees flicking 
minty cloven tongues at me.  My mind insists 
I'm here, yet I know I’m back there with my children, 
who have children of their own now.  My time-warped soul 
is smoldering like a funky motel mattress.  When at last 
I’m in my apartment-- I find great black wings 
unfolding in the kitchen. My thoughts are like misty snail trails, 
furtive as those twilight forest animals known only 
by twig snap, leaf shiver.
   Did my grandmother look into my eyes and see 
my dead father?  Isn’t the soul always back there, fumbling
with old photographs, going down worn paths 
that lead to weedy vacant lots?  It doesn't do any good 
to stumble after these vanishings, yet I do, 
deeper into the dark woods, urged on by coy whispers;
never mind my bruised knees and the cobwebs across my face.  
I have to know:  have I spent my life trying to wake up?  
Or go to sleep?  All I'm sure of at this moment 
is that prose may be the arbiter of the world, but poetry is its lover.