The Rawboned Boy Returns

(Notes on Going Home Again, Which They Say You Can’t Do)

Note #1: Junk Drawer

Back in White Oak for a week
Ah, benighted backwater
Mountain town what flung me–
Safe sequestered
With two generations of motherfigures
My mom & the mater before her
Here in the home that hasn’t been mine
Since I lit like Lucifer
Got kicked outta Hebbenen.

So Prodigal Junior returns to the wellspring.

Late last night,
Way past the old girls’ bedtime
Perchance I happened to be
In Search of Lost Matches
With which to light a “candle”
When amidst the sifting & the shifting
Of the debris & the tchotchke
In the middle of the midden
Also known as
Mama’s Odd Sin Ends Drawer
What in the Wide Wild World of Sporks
Did I happenstance to glance askance
But the following:

One frozen frame in brown & white
A window into misted history
Lifted lofted across canyon time
Cut deeper by the seeping second
From some Then until the instant
I should grasp to hold
Its faded photo in my hand.

Pictured therein wuz:
My Great Great Grandpater
With his Sepia Bride
Upon the occasion of their nuptials
May Eighteenth
Eighteen Hundred & Eighty One
At least that’s what the writing says
On the back of the pic
In so many letters (slash) numbers.

Apropos of not that much
Except to say
I saw my face upon a man
Upon a horse beside his wife
Who also sat astride a horse
In some lost time
I never knew
The man or the horses
Or the woman or the time–

Yet there was my face all the same.

End Note #1.