Merely a Bonus

Once it was used for storage. It was a long time ago,
long before you moved here. You have only seen it
as a slowly decaying relic. Vines grow up the sides,
Green in spring, the color of death in fall.
A ladder goes up the side. A few rungs rusted
and broken, but you can still climb if you are careful.

If you do, you can look down from a doorway in the top
and see the remains of grain left after the silo’s abandonment.
It is rotted now. Breathe in and you can smell
the slightly alcoholic aroma, It is not exactly intoxicating,
not exactly morbid. It reminds you of your father.
From the top of the ladder, you can see the mountains
and your world does not seem so small.

There are horizons past the green hills.
They no longer hem you in and there is room to breathe.
You can see the ribbony roads that lead out.

You no longer have to imagine what lives beyond
these hills. You came in on those roads fourteen years ago
and have traveled beyond them many times.
To the ocean. Far to the south. The flat midwest.
To foreign lands and to stranger places: to love
and the edge of death. They are a pathway, those roads,
a way to slake your eternal restlessness and still
find yourself a home.

Not a home that always was. That is gone. Long gone.
Shattered with dismissal and abandonment,
Leaving you a ruin with wheels. The worst
and best thing that ever happened to you,
sending you here, in the green mountains of Vermont
where everything is an hour away and the winters are long,
where you learned to be both an archeologist and an artist
creating your own internal landscapes out of what was left
and finding them more to your liking
than the ones fate had decided for you,
making you the kind of man who climbs rusty ladders
just to see if they will hold you,
the landscape merely a bonus.

About this poem

May is always a thoughtful month for me. It is the month I moved from Virginia, where I had spent my whole life, to Vermont where I live today. It was more than a move, it was a rebirth, a phoenix time.

Tom