Coming Home

There is a place where I stand

looking out at the river I have always been next to, where sun slides through branches of the hundred-year-old oak, where a bluff goes down to meet the water, changing its name each time, and the light from a nighttime barge, moves back and forth, like the river washing its banks, wearing away anything that cannot stand by itself,

where the voices of little girls gather somewhere in the water behind the barge, the wheel that pushes toward land. Those fat decks piled with coal have never seemed lonelier, when they come back empty, or when the barge-light searches my room, to paint on the wall my darkest image, I have come home, dropping my clothes, around me, and a loud roar goes silent, looking for what I have brought back, goes silent in the river beside me,

and in the black throat of the oak.