[Video: “Sailing to Philadelphia,” by Mark Knopfler (performed with James Taylor) (lyrics)]
From whiskey river:
Desire is never on the map
it’s that unnamed lake you found
once, driving a gravel road, not
where you thought you were going,
fast, window down, hair
loose to the dry wind,
bare foot pressing metal,
soft feathers of cottonwood
drift through, maple seed
spinning in its wild gyre.
Bugs spatter on the windshield
in Rorschach you want to
read like tea leaves, imagine
you might learn how you’ve
come to this road, which
left turn at midnight, which
wrong side of town.Then there it is before you,
glittering pure and cold and
suddenly you want
that stone-skipping ache
more than your life, even
knowing how the cold water
makes each hair stand on end
as you enter, one foot at a time
sand crumbling underfoot,
the delicious submersion,
as you slip the laws of
surface tension, gravity…and so it is you push off from shore,
not caring, this lake, as you knew
the moment you saw it,
has no bottom.
(Holly J. Hughes [source])
…and:
Going home does not come naturally to me. If my father’s medium was silence, mine had tended to be escape. But there’s no future in escape because the world is round. So the faster you run away, the faster you end up, right back where you started, face to face with whatever you were running from in the first place. Your worst fears, they’re always the most patient. They’ll wait up for you. That’s what makes them the worst.
(Holly J. Hughes)
