Pilgrimage to The Holy City, by Rebecca Weigold

1616 Carter Ave., Ashland, Ky, by Michael Spears (USA) 2018. Used with permission of the artist.

Pilgrimage to The Holy City 
​
for Mitch Compton 

We leaf through Kentucky roads in a ‘74 Plymouth sedan. 
Ohio’s spine binds steepled red-letter edition towns sloping 
toward the river. Our passover means crossing two bridges 
and Route 23’s descent to Russell’s vast rail yard. 
​Its screeching voices vie to prophesy of Ashland:  

Armco’s blast furnace, uncles and aunts smoking their lights 
and Eves, momma snapping string beans, trains running 
forty steps from the kitchen door. We pause  
at the leaded glass: 1616 Carter Avenue. Trill doorbell 
petitions our grandmother: Lena. Mammy. 
 
She greets us to laughter, smoke, the emerging incense 
of Easter turkey. The light within gilds the edges 
of soaring scrollwork like illuminated scripture. Behind 
the parlor columns remains the holy of holies: a closet 
under the stairs where she keeps Parsons’ hat boxes of
  
loose photographs. We sit on a mid-century couch at 
the bay window, our backdrop a seven-story car park.
Mammy shows us pictures one by one. This is Lula, 
stirring a kettle of apple butter with a wooden paddle. 
That’s our sister Vera, who died three weeks after Lula.

And here’s Cole, the conductor who owned this house. 
He died in ‘57. And with a lustrous voice: This one...
this one’s Charlie. In the heat of the steel mill. 
The love of my life. She rises to embrace us with arms 
old and strong as porch balusters, her skin soft with the 
 
scent of Jergens. Methodist church bells tear the drapes, 
still the chiseled scribe whose golden pen chronicles 
our family stories on the fireplace frieze. 
Before supper, we slip our prayer in the cupboard’s 
crevices between loaves of Heiner’s bread, coffee tins, 
 
and jelly jars: may we never lose the house that makes us 
what we are. We know when Messiah comes, He will arrive 
on the C&O. Its train horn will trumpet His coming. 
The crossing lights blink their back-and-forth warning. 
The gates lower the same as our reverent heads. 
 
We grab a bag of spongy orange circus peanuts, cross 
the street and make tracks up the concrete mount of olives. 
As Mammy sets out her best china before the blessing, the 
walls convulse and the lions stand transfixed on the oak mantel, 
their mouths gaping, ready to devour the slightest unbelief.

Rebecca Weigold

Rebecca Weigold's poems have appeared in a wide variety of publications, including The Ekphrastic Review. In 1987, she founded/published The Cincinnati Poets' Collective, an annual poetry journal which featured the work of poets for a decade. She lives in Kentucky.