Charles Hood, End of the Road
Taking the Back-Road Home
A gray confederacy of mist conceals
the road home
as rain hisses
beneath each passing pick up.
I climb the hill, cross
the swollen stream
to take the back-way home. I follow
the gravel road beyond the abandoned farm.
This morning
mother cut butter like words
into the frying pan
till father left
in a silence thick with sizzling.
Now, I leave the gravel for blacktop.
Rain settling to sleet edges the tips
of the cedars in ice.
Each divided branch is lost
in the white abstraction of sky. I’m blind.
A numbing cold in my chest,
as I imagine the empty house
born of resignation in this falling white
obscuring
all that I’ve known.
The road home disappears now
in a landscape lost
in ice.
_______________________________
Chapman Hood Frazier