Driving Directions
On the phone, my father speaks near raptures of being
in parts of Virginia he’s known seventy years.
Some places it’s impossible to mark a change. Others
are gone completely, now, but seen painted thickly
under what’s there. Directions to the old farm:
take 221 west through Goode till you hit
where the mechanic used to be, and go right; pass
Screechum Hollow, Heirloom Road, the junkyard
and trailer park before turning right where the drive-in
was, a hole still in the shed where they projected sound
and cast the grainy picture like a cloud of lightning bugs
out against the screen; finally, pass the old red mill,
homes, trees, creeks, and our fields — empty,
green or gold, given the season—hang right again
at the abandoned county dump.
Just past our land, a ravine was strewn
with larger garbage: a washing machine more rust
than white, a wheelchair folded like a dead spider
in on itself. Every fall my mother misses the morning
as it fell then into that green gully to the east. And I see
just what I want to see, careless in my want
to be back there again and open
a vein of water to wet the dry stacks shuffled here,
though what I make is as different from true
as seeds burst from the sepals of bull thistles
along the north fence — fawn at summer’s end with light
and drought, soft as hair, golden as hay — are
from the broad purple matter that used to bloom there.