[Plain Text Version]

The Old Home Place Is Inside You

Forecasts indicate that the last snow will fall in 2025.

                             —Comment at the end of the film

        Never Gonna Snow Again

You wish to stand in winter’s pewter light

At four o’clock with other old men 

You had known all your life, had loved all your life,

to stand by the hay barn

Next to Mr. Walbert’s hay wagon, dredge up 

hogwash to laugh about,

Remember that time? . . . You remember!  Then ask, 

Is Preston still alive? . . . Drinking? 

Each of you furtively waiting for the snow to begin

the blessing that it is.

You wish you had always bathed in the creek, 

spring into winter,

The creek that ran through Patton Hollow, 

and that you still did bathe in that creek.

You wish that your house was no house at all

But a tumbledown affair of clapboard 

and mud-stuffed chinks, 

The grayed-out boards lapping down the sides,

Newspaper pasted to the inside walls to keep

out the dispiriting wind, 

You wish you had never bought a car,

had never ridden in a car, 

had never heard of a car.

You wish you had walked everywhere, 

everywhere

No matter how far you had to walk to get to 

everywhere, 

which is here. 

You wish like a broken vow;

you wish for poverty,

So that time itself might’ve discontinued travel

before this graceless culmination took hold.

You wish for that even as you’d reach your own demise 

sooner than later— 

You wish to look time in the face and say, Take me home!—

Who the hell are you?

You don’t wish for money, sex, power, dark chocolate, 

Kenyan tea, good whiskey, happy sunshine 

painting the waking world, nor to not die—

You wish for repentance for these foregoing lies—

and for love

and forgiveness

and snow.

You wish to be put to harness, a quiet willing mule 

who’d pull with all the other mules 

The sputtering Earth back to its modest but certain 

orbit around its godlike Sun.

Patric Pepper holds a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from the University of Maryland. He has published three poetry chapbooks and one full-length collection. He is a founding editor of a micro-press, Pond Road Press. Patric’s work has appeared of late in Backbone Mountain Review, Bourgeon, Feral, the Northern Virginia Review, Sport Literate, and Innisfree Poetry Journal. He lives on Cape Cod in North Truro, Massachusetts.