Take this bar-song, and I’ll give you something like Iowa
as seen through your grandmother’s window.
In every version, it’s either nothing is possible or
anything is, the beauty of living under stars
not cut right in the first place.
In one story, the day lifts the girls in sun-
dresses clean off the block leaving a line
of highway trees. In the second,
your grandmother points to glass angels shaking
in the curio every time a semi goes down 128
at night — “it’s how you know this house fell
from heaven.” It’s not a bad thing, apparitions
tailgating you on the interstate, it’s worse
when they pass you without asking your name.
This could be a history of a street or a photograph
of you on a car-hood telling us to stay on the yard-side.
It could be the neighborhood too quick to run
itself into the ground, car-shine in the spaces
between houses almost blinding the mothers unclipping
quilts from the line. Let’s say the constellation ripped
in the edging, that you said, “no run for your luck,
no way to live.” That you made your exit, no heart
to mention the upside of starlight, or whatever
you’re looking to. Everything just fine
print anyway, except for the dream part
where you paint over star-marks in the next house,
a joke told by your sister you understand a year later
that now makes you cry more than anything
you’ve heard in your life. It’s okay to never feel sorry
for an apparition, the city you now live in
will stir up something you could hear
a folksong in, the one where you’ll never be as hopeful
as you were that one time, chatting up a ghost asking
if you’ve arrived. Oh how sad it would be
to stop moving, they’d say, to take your hand
and take you home right when we were about to see
the country end just when you least expect it.
Click here to read Rebecca Boyle on the origin of the poem.
Photo by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash, licensed under CC 2.0.
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