Familiar as Ghosts

It is the ridgeline you see,
as you come out of the woods,
The last patch of forest before home.
A narrow strip of silhouettes as the sun sets.

You know every square foot of that patch.
The indian graveyard.
The diminishing piles of saw dust
left from the sawmill from the thirties.
It still steams in the cold mornings of autumn.

There is the forked pine tree
where you killed your first squirrel,
and your last. The moment burned into your memory.
The moment you weighed exhilaration and horror
and came down on the side of life.
The margin was embarassingly thin,
but has grown as you aged.

There is the place you dug out the ancient plow
your grandfather once walked behind,
guiding the mules. As a teenager he told you
about that part of his life,
and when he died, you went back and dug it out.
It hangs, preserved, from your back porch.

Your deepest roots lie in that patch of forest.
It is as familiar as ghosts,
It has followed you to mountains and shores,
more home than home,
Like love and faith, it lives in you,
far more than it seems
to the naked eye.

About this poem.

We all have those touchpoints. Images, smells, sounds that bring out far more than the thing itself. This place, the place in the picture (which was taken on my grandfather’s farm in Surry County, Virginia) is one of mine.

As we age, those touchpoints pile up. Every day they arrive, each one more than the moment you are living in. It can be overwhelming, all the love and tragedy, victory and fallings that flow through you, through everyday articles, each with its own dance card of ghosts.

It was not the photograph that spawned the poem however. Sitting at the last diner standing, a woman walked by, wearing the perfume that my first love, going all the way back to my first year in high school. And suddenly, a rush of memories of every woman I have loved from that young girl to the woman I love this very day, rushed over me. The loves. The endings. All of them. All at once. It was a little overwhelming.

And I realized how many of those touchstones I have in my life. I do not know if everyone is like that or not. But it, the feeling, needed to be written about.

Be well. Travel wisely. It’s a short life.

Tom