The Return

by Edith L. Tiempo

If the dead years could shake their skinny legs and run
As once he had circled this house in thirty counts,
He would go thru this door among these old friends and they would not
shun
Him and the tales he would tell, tales that would bear more than the spare
Testimony of willed wit and his grey hairs
He would enter among them, the fatted meat about his mouth,
As he told of how he had lived on strange boats on strange waters
Of strategems with lean sly winds,
Of the times death went coughing like a sick man on the motors,
Their breaths would rise hot and pungent as the lemon rinds
In their cups and sniff at the odors
Of his past like dogs at dried bones behind a hedge,
And he would live in the whispers and locked heads.
Wheeling around and around and turning back was where he started:
The turn to the pasture, a swift streak under a boy's running;
The swing, up a few times and he had all the earth he wanted;
The tower trees, and not so tall as he had imagined;
The rocking chair on the porch, you pushed it and it started rocking,
Rocking, and abruptly stopped. He, too, stopped in the doorway,
chagrined.
He would go among them but he would not tell, he could be smart,
He, an old man cracking bones of his embarrassment apart.