Homecoming

Carl Boon

My daughter points out witches
where the pines used to be, 
where I lost a thousand baseballs
in the ivy in 1982.

We have no sea
to contain us here,
no landmarks
that cannot fall.

The neighbors have died.
All those mornings in November
the wind swirled the pin-oak leaves
and left them alone.

Cups of coffee
on window-sills,
children gone,
the extremes of retreat.

This is August. Sometimes
from the humid south
a thunderstorm comes, heaving
soil, the stone wall my father built.

That was 1992;
he breathed easily then,
planted ivy that persists
past his death.

The crickets remain. The heat
builds on Third Street.
This winter the dogwoods
will all be broken.

 
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Carl Boon lives in Izmir, Turkey, where he teaches courses in American culture and literature at 9 Eylül University. His poems appear in dozens of magazines, most recently Burnt Pine, Two Peach, Lunch Ticket, and Poetry Quarterly. He is also a 2016 Pushcart Prize nominee.