We talk freely about loving people, loving a favorite song or a favorite film - even loving a place. Can you love a road? And can a road love you back?
In 2010 I moved from one small town to another - well, to a slightly bigger town - in my attempt to find respite for my crushing depression. Winters were brutal for me. Would a more vibrant town help? That's what we hoped to find out.
That year was an unraveling. If I had to look back and mark a time when life had its way with me, that year would be at the top of the list. Even remembering it now, I can feel the ache, how much that year hurt. And yet that year was also profoundly alive. And there was so much beauty, too. Who knew how joy and pain could live, side by side?
I remember so clearly how I sat on my deck under the moon, wrapped in a blanket, weeping with the night sky. In the daylight hours, I walked a ribbon of road, over and over, until that road became a good friend. She held me as much as my friend Sue whom I also met that year, and who remains one of the most generously empathetic people I know.
That year marked the time when I began feeling my grief rather than trying to understand it. I felt as tender as I'd felt birthing a baby, and as vibrantly alive.
I wanted to capture the essence of that year in a poem, and how that road became my companion. I tried to so below. You can let me know if I was successful or not.
Who knew how a road could hold us? To all the roads that we have loved, and to all the roads that have loved us back.
Numinous
In the low bottom of Montana
lies a town. On the outskirts
of that town lies a road, winding
through the Hyalite hills. It crosses
a creek and travels through small
subdivisions of houses, the quiet hum
of soft traffic through wheat fields.
If you look ahead you see waves of golden wheat.
If you look to your left you see rising mountains.
If you look to your right you see the road to town.
I walked alongside that road
for a year. I walked and cried and walked
and cried, my hand warm against the
weight of my chest. I stopped at the creek
to throw rocks in the water, each stone
a hard shame.
That year was the before and after –
when I stopped trying to explain
the particular ache of my wounds
and let them bloom, instead.
At nights I sat, a blanket wrapped
against the cold, and watched the
rising moon. I rocked and cried
and rocked and cried.
My friend says we must all grieve
deeply and well to live in this world.
That year, a stretch of road, an arc
of moon and a cradle of mountain
wrung me clean with grief.
I can still feel my footfalls
on the gravelly asphalt – the warm heat
of July and fierce cold of January,
the way that road held me and the way
I came to love that road and the way
I came to be loved by her.
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