How To Get There, by Charlie Brice

Photo by Rémi Boudousquié on Unsplash

Begin a lifetime ago. Drive down
Townsend Road in winter, realtor
riffing, SUV swerving past icy
spots. Maybe we’d buy a little cabin
in the woods. Instead, we gawk
at a wooden castle on Walloon Lake.
The stone hearth caught our hearts.

Turn left at twenty-six years ago.
Ari’s 16. He and a pal wildly slide
on a sled-run from our front porch
to the frozen lake. They hoot, holler--
whoop their way into rosy skin, gelid
air-mist, near frostbit fingers, hot
chocolate, and a fireplace blaze that
would make Gabriel forget his horn.

Drive straight ahead a few years. A great
blue heron processes across our yard, his
arcanum held in silence. A careful pile
of shells on our dock—crawdaddy’s sacrifice
for the great blue’s numinous meal.

Skid off the road at years of winter flu, intestinal
obstructions, faintings, and skiing accidents
that drove us to the Petoskey ER. Backup into
our living room—gaze into the ferocious fire,
read Jim Harrison, Dickens, Hemingway,
and Jerry Dennis—imagine our former place
up north, breathe its belonging.

Park in the present where we can only dream
the peace we once had, mist rising at dawn,
piliated woodpecker in his primitive splendor,
kingfisher’s mad dive for bass. Our life-symphony
played by placid waves that lapped the shore,
a requiem now of memory, but not regret.

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Charlie Brice won the 2020 Field Guide Poetry Magazine Poetry Contest and placed third in the 2021 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize. His fifth full-length poetry collection is The Ventriloquist (WordTech Editions, 2022). His poetry has been nominated twice for the Best of Net Anthology and three times for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Atlanta Review, The Honest Ulsterman, Ibbetson Street, The Paterson Literary Review, Impspired Magazine, Muddy River Poetry Review, and elsewhere.