"Reunion"
They followed, I am told
In the ancient whispers
Of a family's tragic secrets,
The tracks he left in blood-warm
Mud towards the forest where
They heard the shatter of gunshot
Breaking the stillness of an Arkansas
April evening with a thunderstorm hovering iron-grey in twilight like
Birds on a phone line.
And the mythology of a bloodline would not
Grieve the loss, the blistering of blood, bone and hair across the needle-sharp floor of the pine grove.
Generations would not weep for what the earth could not return.
They would leave a picture of him as a boy,
sitting in a chair that left long shadows of afternoon across
the landscape, as he smiled towards the camera in the same suitcase,
as his parents' marriage certificate and a signed picture of Elvis Presley.
No one would speak of his shoes left neatly, caked with mud, at the edges of his final world.
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