Visiting a familiar and once dear place after a long
absence can knock the words right out of us, and in this poem, Keith
Althaus of Massachusetts observes this happening to someone else. I like
the way he suggests, at the end, that it may take days before that silence
heals over.
Homecoming
We drove through the gates into a maze of little roads, with speed bumps now, that circled a pavilion, field house, and ran past the playing fields and wound their way up to the cluster of wood and stone buildings of the school you went to once. The green was returning to the trees and lawn, the lake was still half-lidded with ice and blind in the middle. There was nobody around except a few cars in front of the administration. It must have been spring break. We left without ever getting out of the car. You were quiet that night, the next day, the way after heavy rain that the earth cannot absorb, the water lies in pools in unexpected places for days until it disappears.
This article appears in Jul 6-12, 2006.
