THERE FROM HERE

By Jason R. Poole
Tired old bones laid down for an epochal rest, you know thats what they are.
Mountain is no word, not for them. More the earthly remains of some Grandmother who
heard promise in the burgeoning trickle of the Potomac and lay her face to the earth,
content to subside nice and slow. Gentle, and at peace. Now the Potomac is brown and
boastful, its path to the Chesapeake long carved into the land, and your old Grandmother
mostly washed away, save for a few worn vertebrae climbing, sloping, their blanket of
red spruce and mountain ash.
She still speaks too, her mouth down there in the strata. You and everyone you
love have heard her. Everyone who walks the lush sprawl of her decay has felt her words
seep up through the soles of their feet and come a ringing in their vitals. The gutter punks
have heard, hopping into loitering boxcars at the CSX depot, dressed in sun-faded black,
a dense quiltwork of patches on their backs, bearing frontman manifestos, or campaign
posters, or B-movie marquees. The greyhairs too have heard, thumbing for rides along
Route 40, standing unsteady in coveralls that smell of campfire, jaws moving behind
closed mouths while they chew on a memory, waiting to see brake lights. And the white
gulls passing through for three days every summer, resting their wings in parking lots on
their way to eastern harbors. And the diaspora of the young, hugging parents next to cars
packed like dustbowl wagons, sitting on benches at the Greyhound station, piling into any
open door, some with a firm hand guarding the back of their head as they lower
themselves into caged backseats of squad cars. Theyve all heard her song, and one way
or another, given answers.
Its a song of farewell, and you were only happy to oblige.
If you stay and listen, you know what happens. No matter how great the
temptation to blanket yourself in those blue hills, you have to go. Even if youll miss the
old houses, worn yet proud to have stared down more than a centurys worth of weather;
miss the sound of them creaking under your step, as they once did for bootleggers
brewing in the basement. Even if the summer locusts still rattle, and the honeysuckle
hangs trellised in chain link fences you passed on the way to school, flanked by boys who
grew into men you still love and trust and call brother. Even if old timers still trim their
hair and sideburns like Elvis and expect you to know all you need to know of them from
their belt buckles, except how much Indian blood theyve got, which theyre happy to
volunteer no matter how small that fraction. Even if Sno-Cone Joe still drives around in
his yellow van and kids hand over crumpled dollar bills saying Tooti frooti! with gaps
in their grins. Even if. Nothing matches the pull of escape. Because if you stay, you die.
Maybe not all at once, but thats worse, isnt it?
The town is a widow seeking company in her condition. They used to call her the
Queen, but now she sits palliative, staring out her high window and laying the tip of her
finger on the people who walk her streets, trying like hell to knock them off their feet.
How many dead before you were thirty? How many faces you used to see in
hallways between classes, sitting at tables in the food court of the mall, smiling between
earnest drags of communal cigarettes after punk rock shows at the Embassy? How many

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friends? Found sprawled in their sheets, or in wavering yellow fields with revolvers by
their side, or in mint-colored port-a-johns with needles planted like flags in their arm?
You had to leave. It wasnt a choice. It was survival.
Even if you sometimes feel like a coward. Even if you had to leave pieces of your
heart behind, and you pray to any Holy thing youll get a call soon saying theyre getting
out.
When you go back to visit, nothing has changed.
The widow still presses down on everyone with the same weight.
The same housing projects you lived in until you were ten, apartment 6-D. Where
your friend Christina stayed with you the night the police shot her dad, shot him dead
right there on Somerville Avenue. The same avenue you played on every day and got
two kites stuck in a tree.
The same petals of cherry blossom skating across the brick lanes in front of the
South Street library. And all those hours you spent learning the shelves within, by shape
and color and smell.
And that same stretch of Industrial Boulevard you walked, led by your mother in
three a.m. dark, hand in hand, while she told you there was no going home because
someone wanted you dead. When you woke up the next morning, the police helped you
understand that sometimes your mother took a break from reality. You had to learn on
your own you couldnt keep her from going.
And Constitution Park, where you lay on the wing of a decommissioned fighter
jet as Fourth of July mortars went supernova overhead, a second before the concussion of
their bursting hit like a slap on the chest. Then the crackling sound of shimmering golden
dust drifting slowly down, down.
And old Irons Mountain, where you were told as a child that the red blinking light
of the radio tower was a ghost-held lantern, and where as a young man you learned they
burned the cross once a month. And still you went up there occasionally, because thats
the place where the woods part and the entire town comes into view. And now you
wonder if this is why they meet there.
And the Narrows, cleft apart by the shallow, meandering Wills Creek, where the
white-faced rocks of Lovers Leap stare down into the valley and freight trains snake
along the waters edge making sounds you wish you could still hear in the calm of night.
And finally that house, where at age eleven you were with all the neighborhood
kids and someones thirty-something brother with the same name as you told you to leave
because your skin was too dark to be on their property. And everybody just stood there,
staring. You didnt budge, despite his repetition, and even then you could feel the sting of
embarrassment turning into something more dangerous. Burning.
Yeah, your Grandmother lay under that earth, singing you a goodbye song all
your life and every year you learned a little more of its lyrics. Those drooping houses
with tarpaulin in the windows and always-open front doors leaking that blue glow of
television. Those yards full of scrap and the leaning fences. The kids with dirty faces
parroting things in their play that in a just world they would have no concept of, saying
them in voices that knot your stomach still. The darkened storefronts and For Lease
signs. The patina of abandonment and disrepair that keeps bleeding on, block-by-block.
And the handful of survivors with their sunken mouths and wheezing laughter. Their
small grunts and groans of movement. Their bodies half worn to dust by thankless work.

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But most of all, you learned from their lightless eyes that pleaded, Leave, before its too
late.
So you did.
Now, you cant go back, because there is no road or bridge long enough. No path
of return to follow. Only too much reflection and too little healing. And the truth is, you
cant get there from here.