BY DONNA MENDELSON

He was born in Home, Pennsylvania,

green quilt hills all around,

but he never felt at home

until he knew sand, bedrock.

My friend had an old family

place, fled, but he had it.

I have a shoebox

of elementary-school report cards,

seven home addresses in three countries.

I find one on Google Maps--

34 The Green, West Drayton, Middlesex.

Street View turns past the remembered

two-story white house, brick wall, wrought-iron gate,

tree-lined green across the road,

but no snowpeak,

no dusted gravel two-track,

or boulder-rolling snowmelt,

no cushion buckwheat, bluebunch wheatgrass,

ponderosa, sage, tangerine breath of doug fir,

no red-tail, meadowlark, coyote,

no lewisia, clarkia, serviceberry, no air

of uncertainty, or this indifferent sky.

You think home

is a meadowed, appled,

place of longing or return

until the wind and moon

come over the saddle,

blow the stars away.

I acknowledge that I am in the aboriginal territories of the Séliš and Ql̓ispé people. I honor the path they have always shown in caring for this place for the generations to come.

Donna Mendelson lives in Missoula, Montana, and serves as a faculty affiliate in the Davidson Honors College at the University of Montana. Her poetry has appeared in Blueline and Rendezvous and is forthcoming in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment.

Process Note: Many of my poems start in response to something I read or hear, as an answer to something said or given to me in conversation with present and old friends, teachers, writers who may have lived long ago, visual artists, musicians, other people on the trail. My revisions usually take place talking with two honest readers who are poets.