Migrant Route

He said his aunt went missing 
last week; she'd managed to slip
out of the house when her husband
was at work, and wandered the streets
of their North Carolina town until she 
was found nearly at dusk. She went
past houses with fences, houses with 
boxwood hedges, the hardware store 
and the shoe repair shop at the corner; 
the elementary school playground with  
swings and bright climbing equipment,
the trains carrying coal rumbling 
along the tracks at the edge of town. 
Farther and farther, not knowing south 
or east or west. Her thin housecoat 
must have fluttered in the still-cold 
February air, its flaps like endpapers 
of a well-thumbed atlas, each map in it 
pointing to the only destination she knew.
When the police found her and gently asked
where she was going, why of course didn't 
they know, she was walking home to Guyana? 
Isn't it something— how even when the mind 
is drifting deeper into a fog, the heart 
remembers a place as surely as the day 
it first pushed off from that warmer shore.