Sing me home, Bruce!

What is the essence of Spring?
Do you mark its disparate, clandestine approach?
Or does the sudden warm breeze
And the parade of flowers
Surprise you?

But the earth has shifted because the sun now sets
On the other side of my window,
And the birds editorialize.

For weeks the cherry buds trembled
Under their sage insect coats,
But now, explode in joy,
Defying the hard earth
And the still bare, black oaks.
Cool, electric breeze streams from a galactic sunset
As I walk home through Turnham Green,
Listening to Bruce Hornsby.

Fate sends an errant football directly in my path.
I kick it back to the little, heaving brothers
With surprising accuracy
And my legs remember the last time a ball passed
From myself to children…

My children,
My wonderful, wonderful, beautiful, waiting children!

Oh my wife! Oh, my home!
Sing me home Bruce!

"Way out here working on the docks
Everyone sees the long day through.
What would I do without the nights and the phone
And the chance just to talk to you?
What would I do
Just to talk to you
A thousand miles away?
What I wouldn't give for only one night,
A little relief in sight,
Someday when times weren't so tight.
When the day goes down on Watertown,
When the sun sinks low all 'round,
That's when I know I need you now.
'You know what I miss,
Is every little kiss…"

I'm moved.
I miss my wife and my home.

Where is my home?

Canada?
Hearing this song, I suddenly remember
Where I first heard it… Canada.
The wind, prairie, sky
And a desire to run for "kilometres"
Buried in a forgotten identity;
A romanticized memory of barren,
Untouched, virgin nature.
"Canada."
I say it out loud
And it feels foreign to my mouth,
Like the Inuit language
From which it emerged,
Kanata
'So far away.
'So "not" San Francisco, New York, London or Paris.
Alien.

This moment reveals
A hidden callous of itinerancy.
My world-weary soul
Feels more entitled to melancholy
Than that of the wimpy 9 to 5-er,
Because I wear the rank and scars
Of the absentee father.

Damn it! What am I doing here?

My children are my angels
And they will redeem me.
They always do,
And only one week stands between us.

I will bring Spring to them.