No planes, no foreign lands.
Only a rental car and the terra
Firma of the USA.
The flags.
Every home and shop
Seemed to have one.
Frantic I became for those
That didn’t, like a man
Gasping for air.Years before, Beloved and I
Drove north with the windows
Down when the AC gave out,
Hoping, mile by mile,
To leave the heat behind.
My thoughts were
Of my mother
Back in New York City.
She had moved into
My childhood room,
And there I had left her
With the fan on high.How too, on that earlier trip,
I saw a waitress
In a French Canadian restaurant,
Angry and servile at the same time,
As if she were my mother
At a younger age.
Later, driving into the Canadian sunset,
I imagined a choir singing “In the Garden”
And began to cry. From a roadside phone
I called, fearing she was gone.
On that same trip Beloved
Went down to eighty pounds and danced
On a narrow ledge over a steep and rocky drop.
A trip where things began to change,
With understanding somewhere in the distance.October 2002