Where I’m From
I am from long rows of yellow corn
and tobacco plants peeping lazily
over slinking country roads.
I am from the cavernous echoes of bleachers,
the lights of high school football fields.
I am from strong, silent types,
recovering alcoholic types,
save- old- bananas types.
I am from line-dried clothes
and the feeling of pine needles
underneath bare feet.
From long, unsupervised summers
mixed with chlorine,
brown shoulders
and Truth or Dare.
I am from yellowed, earmarked pages
and swinging hammocks in the dark.
I am from the Christ-haunted South,
full of the saved and the damned
gathered awkwardly together
by the river.
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I am from groceries
left on the front porch by neighbors.
(Frosted Flakes, mostly.)
I am from my father,
a cast-iron skillet,
a locomotive train,
the laugh with your eyes type.
From my mother,
the tender artist
and the bird whisperer.
I am from overcrowded vehicles
windows down,
sticky fingerprints on the door handles
My grandfather was an orphan during the Depression,
and then Fought Nazis in France,
later becoming a small-town legend.
But I only knew him as a jellybean connoisseur,
a gardener,
a numismatist.
This is where we reside: in others’ memories of us
Perched in a high chair,
Blushing after a first kiss behind a bookshelf,
A wrinkled hand extended
to grasp a smooth one
