JimPerry140

Greensboro,
	Thirty-three years
	they held me
from your too-short days,
your portions still rare
	in creation—
the gravel snap,
the smell of bacon,
the country roads 
	winding the hillsides
	heavy with leaf smell.

Here I am,
	shuffling fool,
	left the car door open
To read with fingers
	the crumpled mask of a hickory.
This Braille of messages
	only a captive can read:
	You are free!

In the night, the silence
	is deep and old,
empty of the cough and grouse
	of the prison pod.
And I keep the window open
	where the neighborhood dogs
	call one to the other.
In mudrooms or carports
	or patios at the end of leashes,
they strain against the pull of night.
And I am with them,
	I feel their need.

Morning is the lush voyage
	from bedroom to breakfast,
	eggs and grits,
the cold, dewed grass at dawn,
the unaccountable explorer’s
	freedom to amble
	down to the road and
	stop to talk to a woman.

We are driving downtown now.
	To its in-between-ness,
	to the old overlaid by new,
	like the Jefferson Standard
	topped by the Jefferson Pilot,
How freedom is restlessness,
	and restlessness is change—
Everything rendered different,
	not better, and
down on the streets, the storefronts,
	I do not know them; their marquees
	offer services I cannot picture.

Then we pass the Woolworth’s,
	a hydrant, an elm I remember, 
	and the years are on me like fever—
The earthly sense of being
	from a place and then
	the nearness of that place.
The push and pull of it,
	moving inside my body,
	nearly broken by waiting,
	but not altogether broken,
It’s vestal cells still alive
	and now altogether open—

They breathe the soap and grit and 
	fry cook odors 
	of this Southern city.
I bring in worlds of it.
	It marks me—
The midday traffic mutters (amiably)
	on Martin Luther King,
A crew cutted toddler
	stumble steps behind his gram,
Fatty freshets of barbeque
	waft from a storefront,
A woman in cornrows
	hips against the bus stop.
I hear country, gospel, hip-hop—
	snatches from shops and cars,
	glinting, hopeful of the many,
	so many trails of freedom.

Are all these gifts yours, Greensboro?
	Is this your homecoming?
Or is this profligate Earth,
	again, returning to its child
	some portion of what was denied him?

An earthly paradise?
	Well, no.
There are still prisons out here,
	war, illness, fear, injustice.

But here, now, in these days,
	these few days of expanding,
there is only us, Greensboro,
	the sober blue dome of your sky,
	your trees in first leaf,
	azaleas flushed with spring,
	and here—

The motley aisles of a grocery store, 
	where a man like me
	can live this electric,
	this angelic feeling
of standing in line
	with a Coke and a bag of chips
	that he picked out for himself
and will buy with his damned own money.