Home

I was born in peanut country
the hospital in Tuskegee that
Booker T. Washington
built with curiosity and perhaps
that curiosity seeped into my pores 
as my mother moaned me 
into the world

and carried me to her father's farm
in Central Alabama where I learned
the mercy of hoeing and picking cotton,
of fingers pricked raw and songs
sung in the cadence or pick and stuff
pick and stuff pick and stuff and 
shuffle to the next row, repeat

I grew up to shelling peas
washing collard greens
snapping green beans
and stories about ghosts
just beyond the window sill
while the wind whistled
through barely newspapered
holes and the ache of
old women's teeth

I grew up playing in pine trees
and cold blue holes
bicycle chains churning
stopping on a dime to pick
wild strawberries, blackberry 
briar patch scratches, 
juicy plums, scarlet and
a honey yellow never quite
matched by any Crayola crayon
Heat rashes, unforgiving fire ants
mosquito bites and dodging
cotton mouth snakes

I do not miss Central Alabama
I remember it, thank G*d for who I became
under the metered tutelage of
my mother's guiding prayers,
her eyes and hands, pressed
then natural hair, proportioned
food, homemade everything
including the desire to leave
the land that reared me

I land in Austin, adopt it, cuddle it, 
stare its streets down one
avenue to the next boulevard

I count toes and fingers
as jazz musicians tap and tangle
the horns and drums and guitars
that whine the blues as the
counter point to riffs and
memories of Dizzy and Coltrane
and Billy Holiday at Victory Grill
and the old Catfish Station
burned in an uninsured fire

and the city is useful in the way
a hat is on blusterous days
or sunscreen on Townlake
at mile marker 3.2 just at the bend
where geese cross in line
one by one and dare humans 
to disrupt their morning walk

I go home tired in Austin,
not from the weary of being battered,
abused in a job that does not
want me or know my worth
but my tired in the city comes
from having put my hands
to the work, kneading my love
in the sinew of poets muscling
their way into revolutionary 
wisdom, changing the world
one word after the other,
visions of overthrow at the end
of tongues and I get to listen
to the explosion of new
worlds colliding into being


My tired comes from making
a home in the streets, from
wrapping my arms around
people and standing at the corners
of pick one intersection after the other
and know why I adopted this city,
hold her tight, call her baby
rock myself to sleep in
the tempo of her people
pace myself to stave off
tired, but when it arrives
take to the walls in order
to rest before returning 
to the city that calls me home.

© Valerie Bridgeman

February 7, 2013
FOR February 5, 2013

DRAFT