Notes from Exile: The Track
Log/Verse: daily reflections from prison, written every morning at my bunk. Part poem, part log book.
The selection this evening for Notes from Exile is in keeping with the theme of Recreation, posted this past Sunday.
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. 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
tipping points that brought me here.
But tempered by 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.
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