It’s a collection of familiar trees,
old houses puffing woodsmoke,
good intentions collecting
in nooks and crannies like pocket lint.
Incessantly present.
Your hometown is a place you drive through
on the way to somewhere else.
Which must be what it always was
— that place that formed you, that sheltered you
in its cupped hands —
though you didn’t yet feel it as such,
standing ankle-deep in the creek as a child, skipping
stones along the familiar surface
of the tannin-rusted water.
Now the landmarks and foliage blur
into a single unknowable mass in your peripheral.
And the woodsmoke, accumulating,
drifts out over the dark expanse of forest canopy,
seeking a place to settle.
— from Juniper Volume 6, Issue 3