My mother and I drive to the Blue Ridge mountains
listening to Bruce Springsteen and the fruit stand
in the flash rain becomes the last thing you said to me,
its red soggy arteries. I turn the song up, oh, thunder
road, oh, thunder road until I cannot feel myself turn
away from you shouting along with big helium eyes
last summer in the karaoke light. I look out at the range,
turning the furnace in my brain away from sorrow
level flames. They’re always blue, says my mother
and it’s true, they’re beautiful—these massive hills.
On a hike, she reads the brochure of George Vanderbilt’s
life—how he came here on doctor’s orders, fell in love
with the landscape and died soon after he built his
empire. All his focus on health didn’t help him
in the end, Mom explains and a passerby tells us
how silence cured her, expanding from her ears into
the lake. I hear a piercing when I hesitate so I apologize
for the noise we do not have in common. After you
died, my mother said depression and I hear myself
count the letters in goodbye—their shrinking. I want
to tell you how I’m filled with defunct rage, a gutted
socket people flick their sorry matches out in. I want
to tell you thunder gives me a false sense of shape
but I am stuck in a state of windless need. Give me
your most electric morning, brand me warm like
the cold Biltmore horses. Give me your silence
but don’t let me keep it. Show a little faith,
there’s magic in the night. I dream of setting fire
to the barn where goats lay sleeping. Not one
wakes for me to tell him, hey, it’s alright.