Notes from Exile: The Track

Log/Verse: daily reflections from prison, written every morning at my bunk. Part poem, part log book.

A decaying recreation area lay next to the prison camp, comprised of a crumbling cinder track where I walked every evening just before dusk. Despite its grim condition, the area was formerly a golf course with giant pines surrounding the track, providing hints of its once-rural beauty. With a small portable radio I purchased from the prison store, I listened to a station that played classical music while I circled the track. Every night, a particular disc jockey played what he called “a long piece for the drive home.” It broke my heart every time he said it. I wrote the following poem after one of my walks.

THE TRACK

Plodding and weaving my way around

the quarter mile of footprints in the ash

and mud, I calculate the dreams and

exhausting tipping points that brought me here.

Its lovely rural beauty and transcendent

silence, the comforting solitary radio

and it’s bridge to life and freedom.

And how many footprints have disappeared

in too many seasons that you can see in its

condition of overgrowth, rivulets and disrepair,

my own already disappearing with each turn.

Today I walk the best of winters breath,

and the falling sun at my favored hour,

a Beethoven riff a séance of sorts to

heal the despair of the fading light.