Homecoming
By Bert Meyers
1
My father was a tender man
whose blue eyes would overcast
by noon. Every dusk
he floated home
in the soiled wind of his clothes.
I flew to the ceiling in his arms.
The silverware sang
as he came to the table
and the bright room rolled
like a train that climbs
its ladder through the dark.
2
His hands are cobwebs full of flies,
trembling in his lap.
They’ve locked him up with strangers,
because he drools too much;
and I imagine freeing him.
We’d go to a town that isn’t there,
where everyone he cries for now
(wrapped in the bed’s thick bandage)
would come to shake his hand.
He laughs. He lifts a child and grows.
He drinks and drinks the meadowlark,
he smooths a stone’s gray hair ...
But he stinks, he’s a huge bib;
a loose scab, a rotten cornflake,
clings to his lip.
3
There are mouths so cold
the salmon-colored tongue
leaps without a sound;
lonely ditches where a broken dove
mourns in the rubble of a face.
Men, at the mercy of their parts:
grime in the skull, despair
corroding the rainbows in their wires.
4
My home was a watercolor
I left in the rain ...
Tonight, the crickets ring and ring,
nobody answers;
the shadows of men are looking for blood.
Someone has stepped
on the classical face of the moon.
Dawn comes, a gradual
mountain range of ashes.
5
The mockingbirds, those joyful books
that opened in the sky,
then closed their pages on a branch,
awake and go mad,
chewing the bones of their old songs;
and the flies, such tiny fenders,
batter themselves in the air.
Notes:
“Homecoming” was originally published in The Wild Olive Tree (West Coast Poetry Review, 1979) and is reprinted with permission of Daniel Meyers. For more information about Bert Meyers, please visit bertmeyers.com
This poem is part of the portfolio “Bert Meyers: A Gardener in Paradise.” Read the rest of the portfolio in the January 2023 issue of Poetry.
Source: Poetry (January 2023)