To the bone

Suzannah Cockerille

It was in ’76 when he drove his motorcycle,

laden with weathered duffel bags, rolled-up blankets

and a handmade guitar case strapped to the sissy bar,

displaying behind him lacquered scenes

of curvy women, the Blue Ridge Mountains

and two little girls wearing fur coats on a sunny day.

 

The gilded wooden guitar case, with its necessary shape,

looked like a sort of joyful coffin riding on its head

for the sixteen hundred cold, wet miles

from Colorado to Virginia.

He wore thermal underwear and worn-out Levi’s

and a surplus store fatigue coat over a jacket.

 

He was damp upon damp and had shivered for days

when he arrived early one morning,

resigned, relieved, tired.

The two little girls stretched open his clothes and blankets

on the morning grass, the red clay earth,

like offerings under the warm Virginia sun.

 

It was true, the sun had shone the morning he left Colorado,

as if to promise and plead, as if to tell a different story this time.

But he never trusted the sky over the Rockies—it was aloof

and its mood seemed to belittle him, to taunt his eastern ways,

his rumbling voice and slow accent,

his longing for a warmer place.

 

He’d grown tired of moody distance, of cold skies and chance

when he strapped every belonging he had to that motorcycle

and set out for home, for what he’d left behind,

for the mountains he loved, for the little girls, the blood red soil—

cold to the bone, determined

not to break another promise this time.

 

This poem first appeared in Ekphrasis 2016.