August 2, 2014

Going Home

Going Home

“You can’t go home again.”
– Thomas Wolfe

I come home to find the twenty-foot tree
whose roots reached every corner of our yard
for three decades and all my memory
uprooted – a pool of mud in its place.

Father says change happens,
they told him to expect me
to have a hard time accepting it –
but that was five years ago, and I watched them glide by
intermittently with no more than a blink.

What’s got me this time are the subtler changes,
unlike the mud pit in our yard, an aching realization of years past, of familiar places and smells
in the face of absence
from which the ghosts spring.

Somehow things have been shuffled –
the letters on the buildings downtown are in a different order,
his car gets parked at my neighbors’ instead of mine,
and the King Kong out by Natural Bridge,
that played with a yellow toy plane above me
as I fell in love for this first time,
has ended up on top of the museum downtown, waving as I drive by.

Everywhere I go in this town I find little shufflings,
changes just big enough to highlight the fact that
I am no longer the same,
and just small enough to make me wonder
if all the ghosts that haunt me have been shuffled too.

I come home in the quiet dark,
and pause on my doorstep (the meeting ground).
A welling in my chest threatens to break the night.
I feel a tightening in my gut
as I swallow, and breathe, and blink.

Jacqueline Zillioux is a MS3 from Roanoke, VA who is inspired by Koethe and Cummings.