Traveling to Thanksgiving
Rodd Whelpley
The porch lights and lawn lights parsed gray from night,
unveiled upswept yards, raked perfect, as incandescents
in picture windows un-darkened tidy living rooms –
the quiet west suburban street becoming a slow flickering
of glimpses into roomy, ordered lives, seen from the backseat
as my father drove slowly up a boulevard one November evening
every year, and I would think, a house like that. Oh,
a house like that.
Now, every day more likely somewhere
in the closet is the shirt or socks or PJs I will die in, a dog
is a convenient reason for wandering out near midnight,
sidewalks ours alone, neighbors’ gardens indifferent to darkness
or the hour, and – clear panes reveal – we are not
the only ones awake. Two doors down, a man, bare-chested,
every time, leans in on his computer. Around the corner,
not quite so often, sits a woman soaked by the plasma flash
of Mickey, Tom or Jerry on her 40-inch TV.
The dog tugs the lead,
wants to go inside, but we stop before the place his shedding hair
has tufted every corner, where posters of each ballet or drama
in which his boy has had the smallest part hang framed, but crooked,
down a hallway. In a chair beneath a gooseneck lamp,
the woman who gives treats turns pages of a book. She will for hours,
while he dreams lazy at her feet.
Somehow the yard still lives,
the front flower bed, the violet faces of the sagging rose of Sharon
I forgot to trim in spring glowing iridescent in the shine of stars,
who have played the longest chances – pushing photons
years toward the pin prick of the earth, gambling
on this cloudless time, this hemisphere’s back to the sun,
to reach this patch of grass and creeping Charlie, as if
the constellations had vaguely hoped for houses. As if they too –
pasted tight to their black heaven – had long imagined us.
Rodd Whelpley manages an electric efficiency program for 32 cities across Illinois and lives near Springfield. His poems have appeared in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Shore, 2River View, Star 82 Review, Kissing Dynamite, Barren, and other journals. He is the author of the chapbooks Catch as Kitsch Can (2018) and The Last Bridge is Home (coming in 2021). Find him at www.RoddWhelpley.com.