Taking the Back Road Home
1972
Comb-bound: 76 pp.
Published: 2000
Price: $9.95
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Taking the Back Road Home’s fifty-one poems detail the life of a poet, commemorating his day-to-day encounters with friends, family, neighbors, and coworkers, as he celebrates "the dedication of the self to useful occupations," as well as his more mystical experiences with his wife and with nature. The poems absorb the reader into the writer’s existence and grant the imagination free rein within his timeless, imagistic world, where "the empty sky . . . / Is a huge music box with smooth duplex combs / Musing us into taking the back road home."
A Belated Anniversary Gift
I love to hear you breathing near me in sleep.
It's as if you were creeping toward me
Stealthily on feeble knees to reach safety
From the giant who chases your virginity
Or, like a tiny, shaking rabbit huddled low
Against a snowy land, hoping in its quietude
To elude hunters and dogs passing slowly by,
Settling instinctively within my geography
And remaining there, neatly as a sealed fortune
Inside a Chinese cookie, beneath sweet sheets,
Waiting to be discovered and have small truths
Translated by my gentle, seeking hands. On waking
From night's brief hibernation in dream-caves,
We are born again into another cold morning,
Alive as pure-burning flames that never expire,
Naked as your breathing being borrowed from God.
