Riding

I am better when I am dead

or when I am

dreaming.

Having finally entered

the carboned pistons

of your machinery.

You, as a boy,

racing through

the warm excess

of night’s soft decline.

When I rise

I kerosene 

my fingers

place my hands flat

on its weeping

branches.

The music is smashed

Wurlitzer, trashed and drug

up from a landfill

in Tazewell.

Earth mixed with quell

and the bright peal

of a mangled glockenspiel.

In the winter hills

of summer, a sick

foal in the barn,

and an old farmhouse

with all its clocks

pulled out.

Its cold room

filling miraculously

with the slow sediment

of forget.

Credit

Copyright © 2019 by Cynthia Cruz. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 29, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

About this Poem

“The poem, ‘Riding,’ is from the manuscript I am currently completing. It occurred to me that my work had veered away from my origins: the place where I come from, the objects and landscape of that place (working class, rural), and all that make me who I am. In this manuscript, currently titled Back to the Woods, I am returning to that place, whether that be a real or imagined rendition of it. In this way, the poems in this collection, ‘Riding’ included, are a return, in a sense, to my first two collections, Ruin and The Glimmering Room, but a return after many years. A return to my origins but a return with the vast sorrow of having turned my back on my origins. At the same time, this ‘return back’ is a kind of triumphant homecoming.”

—Cynthia Cruz