THE STEGER Prize For Poetry
I know no other way than this
Brian Skinner
On the Greyhound bus the trees pass slowly by the windows,
one by one:
they mark the path through abroad amber valley.
The bus is brilliant with sun as it rocks gently on the road,
Virginia to California,
swaying with wind and restless men.
Each rider on the bus must have a destination,
and with that destination a story -
about traveling, about working, about fathers and sons,
or visions or prisons or ghosts or Christ -
everyone believes in the supernatural on the Greyhound bus.
Surrounded by darkening earth, it seems the natural thing.
And if they asked me, would I tell them
that I don't believe in miracles?
Around the highway, Appalachia opens and closes again.
Towns arise like blossoms
in a spring of hills and forest.
Each is like a memory of home:
indistinguishable from so many others,
fragrant and disconcerting.
The riders will watch the horizon
as the bus lumbers forward,
as if nightfall on an open road
were a thing that must be seen to be comprehended.
The land ahead is unknown
but it will all seem so familiar.
And if I were speaking, could I also say
that I have seen this country in a dream?
In Texarkana the bus shudders and stops.
The city is a soft gray lighting
that is pushed gently under the eyes
and felt like dew, warm and dry on the skin.
It has the feel of men coming and going,
of a failed biblical prophecy,
of impermanence and age.
When the riders step out, it will be hard to fight
that sense of being lost or disoriented,
of having made some terrible misjudgment of timing or of scale.
They will hurry through their purchasing and eating,
as if nervous about the presence of something
that is unknown but must be large.
And if they looked to me, could I reassure them
that no one is really watching?
When the highway unwinds and the Rockies appear for the first time
the earth feels like movement.
Desert and forest are made suddenly fragile
at the foot of such steadfast upward motion.
The huddled peaks of mountains share asharp and blue-tinged sadness,
but among them is a stronger sense of life.
Outside Sedona a man will climb up the boarding steps
with squinting eyes and cracked hands.
He is hoping for Colorado
but he will not speak; he will lower his eyes.
As the highway twists impossibly upward
through bright and staggering walls of snow
he will press his face against the cold glass
and think of family.
And if this man is lost, or alone
or in love with that one thing that makes him most afraid
what can I tell him about home?
The rain is pattering on windows indiscriminately.
C10udbanks are parting themselves and showering the earth in patches,
leaving pathways of light above the hills, above the road before us.
And I remember how, as a child, my father spoke to me
of the prophet who saw his God weeping
and cried "How is it that the heavens weep
and shed forth tears upon the mountains?"
"Lord, how can you cry for men, being holy
and covering eternities?"
On the bus I cannot believe in the prophet's God
but I must believe in my father.
I think of rain that falls like notes from a mandolin,
light and sharp on Tennessee's blue ridgelines.
It will soak into the caked earth of the Mojave Desert
and it will make the Kansas wheat fields quiver.
America, listen, I understand
my love for you through my father
who understood his love for God
who wept upon the mountains.
There is little else I know to say.
On the Greyhound bus the trees pass slowly by the windows, one by one.
Their dying leaves are brilliant in a fiery, setting sun.
Back to list of winners.