Remember the winter you were eight years old? There was an evening you stood in the field behind your house, right before your mother called you for dinner. You stood there and unzipped your coat because it was warmer than it had been. You stood there and breathed so deeply you thought your lungs would burst. And when your mother called your name a hundred starlings rose up into the twilight.

Why do we need to remember all of this? 

We're recording roadsides like they're lovers we're afraid to loose;

every moment held tight in our hands

to keep them from disappearing,

or maybe to keep us from disappearing;

to keep our hearts in the right place

even if our feet aren't.

...If love is an awkward, scriptless scene

To be played out between two people,

I cannot write it: I am a pattern

Of breath and sleep that city will outlive.

And if poetry is a bond between
Two hearts, it is a bond too frail:
That night words failed, I too, was lost--
To whiskey, memory, a photograph.

East of that city, the green fields
Are winding away beneath your gaze,
And here, west of that city, there is
No water deep enough to let me forget...

-excerpted from the poem Departure by Joe Bolton

Rutherford County, North Carolina;

 Spring, before the kudzo comes