On the Road from Asheville, NC
for the love of my life There’s nothing crueler than leaving these mountains, the daylilies pouring morning from their summer- honeyed throats. At the end of this road a new life awaits, patient as a scalpel, but I want these hills to bear down, to bury us under white ash, sassafras, the daylilies’ flame sparking the highway’s spine. Thank God some roads wind long enough to carry us back if we let them. Four cities, & we learn to shed what we thought we needed: the chipped plates, the microwave, the unread stack of books, everything except each other. My lily, shriveling behind the wheel—sun-drenched, spinning the cog that currents cool air, I know you as the first to ferry us through pleasure’s port, exalted, your hands guiding the pick past tenderheaded scalp—I bowed into the crown of your ribs, rested to the soft-voiced plink of comb coiling through. You taught me how to worship my neighbors. After the storms washed our roads to ruin, weeks without running water, the city installed toilets along the street, & we used them until we couldn’t, until the seats crusted, crested emblems, drawn in a calligraphy of shit, it was you who tended to the neighborhood portapotties, wiped clean the back splattered stains, without pay or fear of what you could not wash away. I believe in a love perennial, which means, somewhere along this journey, it will come for us. Like the flycatcher cuts the mantle of a dagger moth mid-flight, or the day- lilies who ignite for just one sun before their lights blots out, what burns between us could smolder, or blaze, could inferno till there is nothing left but a stretch of road outside our windshield, one home in the rearview, another blurred somewhere beyond this brilliant, brilliant light. I will come back to you.
Photo Credit: Nic Nichols
Dr. Diamond Forde (she/her) is the author of The Book of Alice, winner of the Academy of American Poets’ James Laughlin award and Mother Body, a Kate Tufts Discovery award finalist. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Callaloo, and elsewhere.
Beautiful