Look Homeward

 

S. Paul Rice

for Thomas Wolfe and beginning
with a line from Richard Hugo

 

you can go home again

but you’ll arrive one day late for salvage,

 

and you’ll find that the farm

stretching from behind your memory

up and over the wide heroic sky

is become a few scrub acres

of run red clay and stunted oak.

 

your favorite childhood elm still stands,

but it has no leaves on its bones;

gnawing things have picked your grandfather’s barn

to a skeleton of rotten timbers

beneath a rattling skin of rusty metal.

 

you can go home again

but you’ll arrive one day late

for those emerald watermelons

with meat of real rubies,

seeds of real onyx,

for the blackberry pies with crusts of burnished gold,

filled with sugared garnets.

 

you’ll find that buzzards circle high above,

making a black cosmology,

a constellation negative against the late afternoon.

they settle among distant pines

as the sun plays its last trick.

you might even find they weren’t birds at all

but a Libra, a Virgo of floaters,

junk the turning years have left in your ocular jelly.

 

you can go home again,

but there you’ll remember

sending your childhood kite a message,

how the wind pushed the words up the string.

you told the kite there was no end to April,

that it was a hawk with a belly full of sun dogs

and no need to hunt forever.

if you could tell the kite today

what would you say?

 

 

that your grandmother who called you in from spring

has become the name on your grandmother’s stone,

that her turnip greens and green-apple cobbler

 

have become the green of her grass,

that the cotton mill girls, your aunts,

now lie in rows like spinning-frames,

while the mill looks on with empty eyes

and dust on its breath?

 

it won’t matter what you tell the kite.

it has tangled its wings in power lines

and rain has washed its feathers into ditches.

 

 time is a river is a cliché.

 if time is a stream

 it’s a dry creek

 with the blue cats

 bloated belly up in the mud

 and stinking.

 time is not a river.

 time is a son of a bitch.

 it is all those creatures grinning in the dirt,

 waiting to steal the flesh from your hands

 even while you stroke the hair of someone you love.

 

 time is not a river.

 time is a short stick

 that takes long years to beat you to death.

 

yeah, you can go home again

but why would you try?

better to ride the interstates at night

with your headlights on dim

and the radio up so loud

you just can’t hear your mind remember.

 

Checking Out Alice

 

S. Paul Rice

Vs. 1

I just went to the grocery store

For the seventh time today.

I bought some ice, took the bag away

And I threw it all away.

I know this might sound silly

But my mind’s all a whirl.

I’m in love with a peach who’s out of my reach

I been checking out my checkout girl.

 

Vs. 2

Yeah I’ve been checking out Alice.

I been standing in the grocery line.

I’ve been falling in love with her

Three minutes at a time.

Is there something there between us

Besides the lettuce and the limes?

For a week I’ve planned to touch her hand

When she hands me back my dimes.

 

 

 Ch.

 Alice is my dream, she’s my peaches and my cream.

 She’s got the finest honey buns this cracker’s ever seen.

 She got sugar she got spice, she got everything that’s nice.

 I’ve been checkin’ out my honey

 Till I’ve spent up all my money.

 

Vs. Instrumental

 

Ch.

 

Vs. 3

I’ve been checking out Alice

On my trips through the checkout line.

I’ve been falling in love with her

Three minutes at a time.

Is there something there between us

More than just this jug of wine?

I’m in love with Alice from the Grocery Palace

And I’m standing in the checkout line.

 

I’m in love with Alice from the Grocery Palace

And I’m standing in the checkout line.