In the late spring or early
Summer of the year my family
Would drive past these fields
As we’d make our way in a black
Dodge up Tollhouse Road for
Shaver Lake or Huntington Lake—
Places my father often told me
He’d spent the best bar none
Summers of his life—yet in my
Own teens it was instead to these
Same foothills of the Sierras
I’d return always these meadows
Of long stiff marsh grass gone
Dry in the heat randomly stitched
By the spring wildflowers
& slow needles of piercing sunlight
I’d walk alone in those low hills
Or with the girl
I’d soon marry very soon to be also
The mother of our son
I need to tell you this now
Because I have you by me the one
I’ve waited for to sketch finally
The story of a boy who’d lie
At night in those fields believing
A world beyond always awaited
Restless in its insistent music
Now after the years of sickness
& lies I’m asking you in your
Stillness to hold this ledger of
Spring accounts & recall the plain
Mariposa lilies & the goldenrod
& the crowns of thistle & the yellow
Star-tulips & the clusters of wild clover
Dusted white & the faint musk mallow
& the endless waves of lupine
All blooming in a way I thought
Might hold me safely forever
& I need to tell you sometimes
I’d fall asleep out in those open fields
Always near the abandoned farm
I loved—its shaky one-room cottage
Still standing though by then releasing
Its boards to the steady season
Its crippled barn already long broken
To its knees & rotting & holy & yet
Wherever in the world I’d travel
It was the memory of that cottage
I’d carry with me I’m not sure why
Even so derelict & so many years
Abandoned it felt always somehow
Like home to me & last night at dusk
I drove again after these forty years out
Tollhouse Road along the long stretch
Leading past Academy & the cemetery
Where Ollie’s family still presides
Then I pulled over at the familiar dirt
& gravel turnout where the same
Weathered planks & fence posts
Rose cracked & swiped by long grasses
Below the white limbs of that ancient oak
I walked out into the meadow
Leading to the old farm & though I saw
The cottage itself was finally gone
& only odd uneven squares of cracked
Foundation blocks still stood
Sinking into the long white grass
I could also see I swear to you just
Above & slightly to the right of the three
Concrete steps leading up to what
Now was nothing & no doorway
I could see hanging there impossibly
In the air exactly as it had always hung
Yet now only as the empty frame
Of the landscape nailed upon
The crossbeam of the blackening night
The same kitchen window that once
Opened onto these fields of wildflowers
& it floated precisely where it had
As if the cottage itself were yet standing
As if it were now my own window
& I could see that a light was burning
Once again within as if yes you were
Somehow waiting exactly
As I’d imagined these past months
Waiting at the burled black oak
Table with warped legs & its surface
Scarred by your bracelets & keys
Having your evening coffee over
A field guide of trails or alpine blossoms
& so I need now to ask you
Which of the old journals did you first
Open to a map of my long wandering
When did you first know I’d come back
& how did you find yourself here
& how did you know this single lantern
You are reading by was the last possible
Light to lead me home?