Home (from Court Square Fountain-

where affluent ghosts still importune

a taciturn

slave to entertain

them with a slow barbarous tune

in his auctioned baritone-

to Hank Williams' headstone

atop a skeleton

loose in a pristine

white suit and bearing a pristine

white bible, to the black bloodstain

on Martin King's torn

white shirt and Jim Clark's baton,

which smashed black skulls to gelatin)

was home, at fifteen: brimstone

on Sunday morning, badminton

hot afternoons, and brimstone

again that night. Often,

as the preacher flailed the lectern,

the free grace I couldn't sustain

past lunch led to clandestine

speculation. Skeleton

and flesh, bone and protein

hold-or is it detain?-

my soul. Was my hometown

Montgomery's molten

sunlight or the internal nocturne

of my unformed soul? Was I torn

from time or was time torn

from me? Turn

on byzantine

turn, I entertain

possibilities still, and overturn

most. It's routine

now to call a hometown

a steppingstone-

and a greased, uncertain,

aleatory stone

at that. Metaphors attune

our ears to steppingstone,

as well a corner-, grind-, and millstone-

all obtain

and all also cartoon

history, which like a piston,

struck hard and often

that blood-dappled town

scrubbed with the acetone

of American inattention. Atone

me no atoning. We know the tune

and as we sing it, we attain

a slow, wanton,

and puritan

grace, grace can't contain.