Listen to this poem reading by Leslie Norris

This morning he takes the car up the hill
and parks at the corner of 4th and 10th.
It is early, but dawn runners in the sweats
have all jogged home; journeymen, their pickups heavy
with metal toolboxes, with shovels and pickaxes
and coils of electrical wire, have been an hour
at work. Business people and the professionally suited
have not moved from their breakfasts. It is between
purposeful times. He walks along the old road
as it attends the river or turns for some ancient reason
from the river's voice. Cottonwoods hang over him.
The runnels are full of their white tufts.

He is happy under the branches, stepping
in dappled light. In Slindon Woods, years ago,
he knew a tree which held beneath its tent
a clearly defined warm air, always warm and still,
even in winter. That was a small beech tree, young
in a company of veterans. And there were other trees,
untidy evergreens, restless and irritable, without
comfort. He did not have to think then of such things,
to recognize a wych elm, to mark how a wild briar
thrusts its simple blossoms among the hawthorns.
Here he has to learn by conscious observation
the trees he passes under. He forgets their names.

(But - an old superstition in his country -
he always stations at his gate a pair of rowans,
red berried, an arboreal safeguard against the evil.)
The sequoia, the bristlecone pine, the ponderosa
will not stand in the landscapes of his dreams, taller
though they may grow, nor the honey locust and
the northern catalpa. So it is surprising that there
come into his mind this alien country, almost
as if he had never left them, men of his family
he has not thought of for many years. Dead men,
all of them, uncles and great-uncles, his grandfather,
so long dead he could not recall the old man's face.

Yet here they smile at him in their living lines,
familiar as his own hands. "I saw you," says
his grandfather, "at Bethel Chapel door, penniless
outside the penny concert. A little boy, tense,
standing straight up, determined with another little boy.
'Let him in, Dadcu,' you said, 'let him in, he's my pal.;
I liked that. I knew then that you'd go along way."
He stands among the approving ghosts, disturbed.
"I don't remember." he says. "Oh, we do,"
his uncle Jacko says, "It's not enough you could read
before you could walk. We've had to listen
all these years to stories of how wonderful you were.

You're Dad's favorite. But you have come a long way."
Smiling and nodding. "The Promised Land." says Willie John,
his dancing cousin, amused and tolerantly mocking.
"This is a generous country," he replies, "Great cities,
deserts no man has ever walked. An abounding country."
But even as he speaks it sounds like an apology.
Only death could have pulled these stubborn shadows
out of the sour fields, the poor streets strung
among coaltips. Not a man among them would have
walked to Birmingham to the factories or sailed
out of Aberaeron harbor with a cargo of salt for Liverpool.
Certainly not a man had worked the deep seaways and,

thinking he'd seen a ghost, had found his brother
in the streets of Valparaiso. "You've a good place here,
right enough," Willie John says, "Tribal, Utes, Zunis.
mountain men, Mormons. We Joneses would fit right in.
You've chosen well." their laughter is around him,
kind and fond, and he laughs with them, all distance gone,
his daily questions calmed and rested. A small wind
from the world startles him alert. His warm ghosts
are going home. "All's well," his grandfather says, his voice
not even a whisper. It sounded like 'All's well'. He walks
in the dust as if he is young and the sun not yet a burden.
Traffic is moving over the river bridge; but not a serene,
momentary radiance which is his alone and nothing

to do with the morning is showing him a brief eternity.
He has plenty of time. Three calling boys at the river's edge
throw down their bikes. Thinking of six pound trout,
they tie their hopeful lures, pay out their lines, and cast.
into the lucent morning. "All's well," he says, "all's well."