Down 'Ever-After Ln'

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Down 'Ever-After Ln'

I glimpsed the sign on west-bound 55,
and while my ‘99 Tacoma hurled 
onward, nose-down to home, my homeless mind 

went trooping past the mailbox, down the gravel
path where I somehow knew a little cabin 
would be waiting at the end, a grey-haired man 

just slicing home-baked bread, lathering on 
fresh apple jam—his wife, hair up, sitting in 
the butter lamp-light, knitting woolen socks

beside the wooden bowl of lemons fast
asleep and dreaming zesty dreams—the lock
unlatched outside the banging screen door. And as 

the Carolina chill comes crawling down 
the pine-tree hillsides, the cabin warms, a light-
house in the dark, a spot of morning in 

an inky night. If ever-after is, 
in fact, a cabin and a couple at
a kitchen table way down a gravel drive

beside a North Carolina highway, that makes
some sense—Eve and Adam playing checkers in
their matching striped pajamas, waiting on

their wayward children to join them at the table.

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