On This Road, Driving By

On This Road, Driving By

In my Father’s House are many mansions…

                                                           John: 14-2

From the road, it all, every house, takes on the mantle

of a passive crowd moving (though it doesn’t know it, the crowd)

(though maybe that occasional few and aren’t they straight away

gagged quick as lickity split) to their doom: house

after house after house and all the human things all the animal

things that happened in them that no one that anyone

believes but see they’ve got their reasons for saying so, they do:

take the place next door to me, it’s gone now, the house

and the barn (I never knew the barn but I’d play on the slab of

foundation floor, avoid the cellar hole) and some of

the trees that went too in the fire but the grounds and the roots

fan out to meet other trees older trees that were there and still

are in their always dark.  This house I walk by or used to every

day was mostly empty and caving in, it wasn’t livable in fact

but when he came back with his daughters it was like

something out of Faulkner if you get my reference

he interfered with them he was a sick sick man the men

said I heard later he struck them and touched them

and fed them the ghosts he brought from Poland when he

and his folks rid on the last living trains out, road on in

to Canada and everyone else would file by in the opposite

direction, south, to the ovens, so maybe (is it you?)

he’s given a little room to be crazy, he’s not right

in the head, he could seduce, but who isn’t charmed by him

his elegant accent he never talked about anything but whomever

you to pull that you out of view of his daughters

abused, bleeding from the…well we don’t talk about that

and he’s dead now anyway dead and buried back in Canada

it’s just a house now isn’t it, a gone house a burned down house

struck one night by lightning arsonists I heard they got time

for it, funny how that happens, the rapist goes free and the man

taking the only revenge he knows for the rumor of those girls

goes into the big house and well, that’s all I can see on a night

like tonight on this road driving by.