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Tony Gentry

Visiting Friends in the Mountains – a poem

Updated: May 17

Drove five hours out to see my friend Rondalyn at her creekside home in Morgantown this week, came home and went right back out the next day to do some woodworking with my friend Ken at his riverside retreat in Verona. Conflated the trips in this revery at the brink of retirement from my career at VCU:


On the cusp of summer driving to see friends out in the mountains:


The pencil thin road traces a cleavage of hills like a reclining body’s contours, so you

roll down the window reach out and tickle the breeze with your fingers.


These are ages old ranges comfy as sofas the plush deciduous carpet running right across their peaks.


Old friends, too.

I don’t need my GPS to find them though the highway climbs to rutted trails along serpentine streams.


They greet me with hugs and dogs the whole visit like those fairy tales where the wandering and lost find a hermit and his hermitage and a way of living that invites a raft of questions about what you do and why.


We sit in rockers out back shoulders round faces creased sipping whiskey. Our babble and the stream’s worrying the puzzle of worn rock at our feet as twilight deepens.

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