Yanking my lank hair into dog-ears,
my granny frowned at my cowlick’s
revolt against the comb, my part
looking like a dog’s shank
no matter what she did, crooked
as the dogtrot path
out the mountain county I left
with no ambitions to return,
rover-minded as my no-count granddaddy, crooking
down switchbacks that crack the earth
like the hard set of the mouth
women are born with where I’m from.
Their faces have a hundred ways to say
“Don’t go off,” “Your place is here,”
“Why won’t you settle down?”—
and I ignored them all like I was one
of their ingrate sons (jobless, thankless,
drugged up, petted to death), meandering
like a scapegrace in a ballad,
as a woman with no children likes to do,
as a woman with crooked roots knows she can.
“When you coming home?” my granny
would ask when I called, meaning “to visit”
but meaning more “to stay,”
and how could I tell her
that the creeks crisscrossing
our tumbledown ridges
are ropes trying to pull my heart straight
when it’s a crooked muscle,
its blood crashing in circles?
Why should I tell her
that since I was a mop-headed infant
and leapt out of my baby bed,
I’ve been bent on skipping
the country, glad as a chained-up hound
until I slipped my rigging?
What could I say but “I’ll be home Christmas,”
what could I hear but “That’s a long time,”
what could I do but bless
the crooked teeth in my head
and dog the roads that lead all ways
but one?
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