Motor By
       

You never said northern air was a cure-all
for demented spirit, but I plunged in crying,

Cure me. Sunset, castle, tidal bank:
I am weary. I shouldn't have thought finding

color in a bleak landscape or bloom
briefly achieved meant much.

You and I consist of the line between
this place and that, a nose forever

for bounty, a craving for boon.
We find carved from the moorland

one farm field abutting an oak grove
sheltering the farmhouse convenient

to its barn, dull pebbledash, a slightly tawdry
hedge, the washing line, a broken-down car

and the corrugated barn roof nearly detached,
its inconsolable drip grooving the concrete.

The red flowered window boxes garish, too
red to be real, a warning flag to all who frame

the hill with windshield and rearview mirror.
For it will not be saviour nor salve.

Despite the track that leads to the house,
a child's finger-painted sea taped

to an upstairs window, the flowers,
nor the washing line will do anything

but stare as we hold each other very far
from the home that home now seems.

          Our mission to the hinterlands.
We'd hoped to retrieve some bell heather,

an asphodel, but nothing here wants us,
knows what to say, nor begins by asking.

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Copyright © 2015 Emily Wolahan All rights reserved
from Hinge
National Poetry Review Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission