A Perpetual Place

There is a place along Algonquin Road
that I pass by, when I am on the way
from here to there, whenever fates allow
my passage and the meeting points align,
a place in time that stirs me every now,
between point east, a chapter of my youth,
and then, post-scripted, education’s berth,
while to the west, the middle marriage days
when we would send our toddlers off to school
and lose ourselves and move ourselves away.
We ended twenty miles to the north,
but still I pass this wooded place, preserved
along the Des Plaines River corridor,
both nestled in the shadow of O’Hare
and paralleled by I-294,
this quiet place, in spite of everything,
a respite from the traffic’s constant noise,
a solace more important than it seems,
a piece of peace exceeding understanding
and this, the place I stopped one day to scream.

O Holy Week, your passions never fail
to move me, if not too far from the pews,
and Spring, each passing year you manage to
renew my spirit with your April rain,
and even now I want to cling to you,
but I have always had my destinies
to pull me through and keep me on the road,
and though I know this place will never be
the only place I’ve found myself compelled
to stop along the way, to feel free
to park the car, to leave the beaten path
and walk into the muffle of the woods,
to sit a while upon a fallen tree
and ponder where I’ve turned and what I’ve seen
and think about the sounds surrounding me,
there’s never been another place or time
where in my desperation it would feel
or when from daily driving it would seem
so necessary to set everything
aside, to face the forestry, to scream.

And still that April echoes in my soul.
When you have lived for twenty seven years
and you would live for fifty seven more,
when you’re not certain what may lie ahead
and you don’t have the world you had before,
when this big city closes in on you
and overwhelms you as you make your way
from here to there, when you can’t take the sounds
of now and then, and when you cannot find
a place along the way to turn around,
allow yourself, at least once in your life,
to claim that place, your own Algonquin Road,
and pick someplace that’s not so far away
or out of reach that it might be forgotten
or lost to random paths of yesterday,
and even if you never stop again,
pass by your April every now and then,
and if some day you move your stuff upstream,
you’ll keep this place and time forever, where
you walked into the woods one day to scream.