There are places to go with a full tank
where an empty one would keep me home.
Southern Lancaster County is a secret
to explore this blue evening by red Skylark.
I drive past stretching corn with horses & cows
grazing on steep hillsides with shadows growing.
River road takes me along the Susquehanna
into Dickey’s DELIVERANCE river rats
without plucking banjo or rifles raping.

I walk the ancient hallway of abandonment
the old railway track under Turkey Hill’s cliff
with the birds roosting & the river running slow
but I must move on to get to that pinnacle
I’ve heard so much about like a myth,
a legend of Indians squatting on the rock.
So I drive up & down the ridges thru hamlets
of mansions & shacks with junk yards
as if the rich & poor always lived side by side.

Th politician John Barley has his gazebo here
beside black buggies and strewn farm fields,
a hedge against charges of corruption
as if the wildness will justify his legal case.
I cannot speak for him but I do smell
the harmony of horse farms on a summer night
where fireflies light the meadows of long evenings.
Let the righteous & the crooks find refuge here
beneath trees that shout at the canyon railway trestle.

I take the beat-up Buick over the Conestoga Creek
into the Safe Harbor Park when I instantly
remember family picnics with the Hess’s
with the sweat of Honduras still fresh on our skin
as if Tocquan Glen was behind Trujillo
and old canal locks in Kelly’s Run
could take us to Tocoa’s thatched huts,
where thick trees overhang the serpentine road
and family farms sprout on overgrown hillsides.

I follow the signs curve after curve, the promise
of arriving at the Pinnacle rock in time
to watch the orange sun sink down below
the York County bluffs in the western horizon.
And there it is before me, a wooden rail
picnic tables, and a falling away down
700 feet to the railroad skirting Lake Aldred.
I hold my breathe & shudder at the deep
waters of nothing but blue river, cliffs & sky.

At the canyon among trees clinging to rock
I can stand over the edge and brace myself
watch the silent fishing boats & sun sinking,
but a speed boat echoes around the curve
before seeing it I can recognize the sound
a water skier way down there slicing the dark
lake crisscrossing the dual wakes, jumping
from side to side making sport of the river,
as if he too can ride on water into the holy.

The sky turns crimson, the boat disappears
and all the earth rests quietly & righteous
before me, to forget everything but just this:
common grace is nature at the end of the day,
the encroaching night to drive back the way
I came here beneath a rising crescent moon
and Jupiter’s jewel standing guard over York,
over Holtwood Dam, the uninhabited islands,
the bald eagles with eaglets nesting out of sight.

The way home is much shorter than the going
with Bob Dylan singing “Blind Willie McTell”
bootlegged by lightning bugs blinking around
tiny church steeples, nameless old town cemeteries,
I find the shortcut thru corn fields to Turkey Hill dairy,
passing by the stinking flats where the drought
makes pools & mud holes of heron-winged estuaries,
and Washington Boro is dark with no streetlights
for the homes here have light-glowing enough inside.

© 2002 Daniel R. Miller