Gravel

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.

 

Credit

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

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