1 minute read
Lorne Mook
Tipton Poetry Journal – Summer 2021
The Friend
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Lorne Mook
In dark woods well east of state road 86 two miles of dirt road erase the decades. I watch for the long driveway carved into memory and see it just too late to turn. But past it there is a place to pull over and look back at a vista—the gray barn and, hugged by trees, the house he lived in the year his dad was on sabbatical, and we best friends and seventh graders. Here it remains—real, unmarred. And though I know his pet goat Obi-Wan and his parents I wished could be mine and the ball and bats and mitts for the game between the garage and the grass-covered barn ramp are gone, it seems he could walk as naturally as breath from under that weeping willow and still be twelve instead of fifty, as I know he is—wherever he is— and don’t want to think about us being.
Lorne Mook teaches at Taylor University in Upland, Indiana. Some of his poems are gathered in his book Travelers without Maps. His translations of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems have appeared in journals and in his book Dream-Crowned, the first English translation of a collection that Rilke published in 1897 when he was 21.
