the home trip was shorter than any desire worth pursuit followed by a week strip-mined between Wheeling and Zanesville where the alphabet winds down and begins again in Ashland or Barnesville, maybe in another language still here I’m settling down as a monk in my scriptorium or as a bootlegger distilling silos of citations and trophies or as a bachelor milking his own antiquity to that point where you no longer know if you’re any good or not, you’re just pushing what you have to your best abilities . not everyone comes back