Poetry in the Afternoon

Because it's miserable outside, I'm going to post this poem and hope you all enjoy it. It's pretty long. Sorry :(. As you might be able to tell, the theme this week was travel...

Holly Golightly Meets Her Match

I hate Arizona,

even the canyon tried to swallow me whole-

if you had seen me giving that Mexican boy hell

in the Pepboys on a steamy Saturday evening ten minutes

before closing time and five hours after I was meant to be in San Diego

you would have believed in me

that was Yuma, but Pheonix was just the same

until Steve at the triple A sorted me out and

calmed me down after my battle of wits

with the morons at the dealership

I don't think it would have been easier if you were there

maybe in California, once i got out of the desert

that godforsaken desert that kept on and on and on

like the free range in New Mexico where I was sure

I would die an unrecorded death and not even the cattle

would find me before my body started to swell

and the silver bullet of my car began to stink to high heaven

but California, you would have liked that

San Diego, Los Angeles - not so much

but Monterey, Santa Barbara, that little unnamed town

with the stretch of beach so perfect it made me cry

and I sat there until the wind made my ears start to scream

my hair reduced to the beginnings of salty dreadlocks

it rained in San Francisco, the fog covered the bridge so that

I couldn't see anything but the faint outline of Alcatraz

the old married couples and teenage lovers asked for pictures anyway

I made sure to hold the button halfway to focus so they remember clearly

the deeper I got into the forest the less enchanted I felt

farther and farther from your cities and night life

and Chinese take out you say is actually crap

but better than none at all and I kept driving through

what they call the Avenue of the Giants

and hoping to God that there would be some sort

of food to be found sometime soon because

it is lonely in the Pacific Northwest

so I waited by the homeless man at the Capitol building

and climbed trees barefoot in the snow

met a little girl named Sorcha who can't eat dairy but whose

mother speaks Irish and comes from Donegal

they have tea with Susan in her shop on High Street almost every day

I found a family who needed me more than you

I waited there and chased away monsters,

they loved the circus called Merlin on the Trampoline

there was no trampoline in my room with the slanted ceiling

right off Chemeketa street that was not really a street

just a dead end like the light in my room wasn't daylight

only a pull string light bulb and at night

the train made its last round at two a.m.

Oregon's state motto is She flies

with her own wings and so I did too

and left the children running after me in the middle

of the road where no one but the mailman who was afraid

of the dog who would never bite, ever stood

I tried to tell the man with the ukelele on the park bench goodbye

but he had never found my gold watch and walked away with his shopping cart

Idaho is a place where people from Oregon

go to rehab and young women should never travel

alone because the woman at the only convenience store

in what is not a town outside of Boise would never

trust the roads or men in Idaho

but Utah is just as questionable with shirtless roadside truckers

who rose from their moving cab to wave at me while I took a picture

of snowcapped mountains because I'd never seen mountains

with that much snow and though I'm sure that missionaries are people

just like us, the lady in Idaho doesn't believe people

have manners west of the Mississippi River

I cried in hotel rooms that only had room for one king bed and still

smelled vaguely of cigarettes and one night stands even though

the sign outside showed happy families that looked like the type

of people that might smoke but never inhale

I didn't write this part of my life down because you had stopped reading

and I stopped crying when I found more snow in Wyoming and two cowboys

who checked the air in my tires and told me not to drive too fast

the roads are so so straight out here and I can drive forever because stopping

means I might miss something

you almost made me miss the Rockies but I pulled

myself together in time because I would never forgive myself

had I not flirted with the college boys on a skiing trip just because I could

I had not spoken a word for miles except

to that boy you never liked because you said he was a creep

and something of a redneck with too much money

he wanted to marry me but I thought it was a joke

like the boys at the rest stop with their skis on top of Toyotas

who bought me a coffee and asked me if I would stay

Nebraska came just in time to sway me with October,

there is nothing like that light that you imagine never appears anywhere else

except maybe just off the Columbia River over the Cascades into

the Indian reservation on your way out of Portland

but surely, nowhere else but there and this stretch of land

that Willa Cather used as propaganda to lure you and me into a

false sense of security because I was not your Antonia after all

because heaven isn't heaven, it's only Iowa

I stayed just long enough to cross into Missouri

where the only thing between Kansas City and St. Louis

is what saves these cities from themselves and the rolling hills

produce red barns and farmhouses that match the ones in my dreams

the best grilled cheese I ever had came from the Sonic drive thru just

before midnight and I would have gone for another but I was writing again

as if I didn't know that the arches in St. Louis would be the gateway to the hell

that is Indiana but is still more appealing than Arizona or say, perhaps

Lubbock, Texas regardless of the musical genius it produced

everyone has to get out of somewhere and in Texas there's nothing else to do

but learn to play guitar and hope one day you might live somewhere else

even if it means living in Indiana

the Queen of England has never been to Arkansas

but she has been to Louisville, Kentucky

and I have been to both and you have been to neither

I don't believe it is because you can't appreciate the beauty

of something you don't understand but perhaps it plays a factor or

perhaps you are just afraid even if I believed you were never afraid

of anything save running out of cigarettes or those drugs you stashed

behind the air vents in my car that summer we spent driving around

Staunton, Virginia for no apparent reason except I remember it was Staunton

because of the Waffle House by the interstate exit

by the time I hit the mountains, the ones that don't have snow in the summer

I was feeling better about you not feeling at all

when the sun hits the dome of the capitol in Charleston, West Virginia

it is best to look away to avoid the glare and pray that you stay on the bridge

and everyone else does too because that dome is really something else

they may burn couches in Huntington and you may say that the people here

are backwards and I may be inclined to agree but there is nothing you can say

about the mountains that go on forever like the sea in California

that moved me and would have moved you but you were not a part

of this journey even if it was your idea and I cross the mountains anyway

and I would do it over and over again because this is not the desert

I know you measure your life by the cities where you have lived

and the places you have traveled and not the people you meet

because you would see the rest stop and not the hippies outside

the men's restroom door hoping to catch a ride and maybe an extra joint

to end up at another bathroom door a couple hundred miles somewhere else

and you would never offer them a ride not because you aren't like them

but because you wouldn't see them because

for all your interest in the world you wouldn't be caught dead

buying peanuts from a vending machine off Route 66

I didn't know that but I do now and I only have you to thank

for the unlikely conversation over strawberry shortcake with the old man

who ran that bakery in Memphis and the sweet black man who worked there

and left shortly after to become a hairdresser in Chicago

if it weren't for you I would never have befriended that cop that pulled me over

at the state line outside of Lincoln, Nebraska and he would never have warned me

about that speed trap in Iowa so I'm not sure how I can thank you for not

loving me enough and not moving into that studio apartment in New York City

where we were supposed to be instead of driving all over this giant country

that is more united than we are and that's not saying much

so this is me trying to thank you for your last act of tenderness

I am not afraid

I am. Not. Afraid.