All Roads by Bryan R. Monte For Ronald Linder (1930-2004) All roads lead to the same place We said laughing to each other Listening to John Cage on the car radio That Presidents’ Day Weekend, unbelievers Lost in the sudden, spring-green Olema Hills Looking for the Vedanta Retreat The day after we heard the bald, brown Orange-robed swami chant OM – Shanti, Shanti, Shanti OM – Shanti, Shanti, Shanti In his peach socks and brown wingtips And say: The teacher is the student and the student, the teacher And suddenly we exchanged places Fathers and sons to one another My arm swelling strangely from your tetanus shot My ex-lover barricaded in the back bedroom Coughing through Christmas with pneumocystis As we read poems at my kitchen table About lunch counter dinners and interstate abductions Your mother’s monthly suicide threats Or the iron block on the door lock Your father reamed with a $20 bill Until your family disappeared in the middle of the night Your brother laughing at the landlord Your parti-coloured books left behind On the shelf over the radiator. The years we gave to those who never loved us The years we lost to those who never knew us Borrowing money for textbooks, going without meals Sleeping on the sofa or the floor Working weekends, school breaks, summer vacations Watching the smiling, tanned, college men with their dates Rush out of the stadium after the game As we rode the bus home from another Saturday shift Arms still twitching for typing contracts or mopping floors To pay the tuition, to the earn the diploma, to get permission To make the endless daily rounds with maddening precision From nursing home to hospital to office From insurance company to night school to students’ homes The 9.30 PM private English lessons The 3 AM hospital admissions The booze, the drugs, the invisible armies Under the skin that carried our friends away The paperwork glaciers that froze out our poetry Then buried, ground up and wore away the years Cannot be undone no matter how carefully we turn On these steep, green hills above the Pacific Ocean Breaking beneath us or ask the swami for directions OM – Shanti, Shanti, Shanti OM – Shanti, Shanti, Shanti He chants as we sit and wait to go home.
