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Gravel

David Baker

1954 –

Weed-wrack and wild grape

hanging from the dusty trees

that touch above the narrow road.

I’m driving my way back

—rough passage over gravel—

back the slow miles over

the creek, the lapsed meadow

we walked for arrow points

until the road narrows to path.

I park the car. I pick my step

past rusty barbed wire through

a clearing to the house.

Back the house. Back the years.

                                                      Back with him now with me

over broken floorboards,

                                                      stone footers, the pot stove—

a whippoorwill, years distant

                                                      through the paneless frames.

Half a staircase leading up

                                                      over the century of beams.

Back now again the old road

                                                      disappearing through white woods,

where he lay down and breathed

                                                      no more.

Copyright © 2019 by David Baker. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 11, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

David Baker

David Baker was born in Bangor, Maine, on December 27, 1954.

About David Baker

Themes

About this Poem

“Fifty years ago my father and I discovered a very old farmhouse or school building, way back in the deep woods of rural central Missouri. We’d been hunting for arrowheads along Cedar Creek, and this house—wood planks, three windows, rusted tin roof, surrounded by tall weeds and very old maples and walnut trees—was back another five miles or so down one after another one-lane gravel roads, unmarked, some washed out, and beautiful. When my mother died in 2013, I would visit my father in his nursing home and take him for drives around the countryside of Jefferson City. One day, on a whim, we found the first old road and seemed to know where to turn each time. There it was, still standing, still empty, on a woody ridge running along a limestone hillside. It outlasted him, it will outlast me.”

—David Baker

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More by this poet

Air Of

—then lightly rubs the
inside of her wrist

to wrist the flower
fullness the furrows

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Storm Psalm

Dear darkness. Dear where we bow our heads in disbelief.
     Dear disbelief, hardly bow our heads and
hardly speak, so we sing, such words as darkness
     shows us how on days on end. So I sing it is
not hopeless. Hurry hurry. Nor faithless—to stand
     without faith, keeping open—. Now another
so they say, thus the trees utterly are still, and the wind is,
     and what wings there are utterly still in limbs
darkened above the barn. Bow down, for this darkness

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A slight wrinkle on the pond as he said

all that’s left of this life is what remains

for the next three redwings motionless now

David Baker

2018