Road Work

The radio clicks and blurts the morning news:

John Updike publishes a collection

about golf, the new dictator takes over Zaire,

and violent storms return to the plains of Iowa.

The dust is everywhere,

dermis, latex, diesel,

feeding every allergy ever conceived.

The showers sigh in every room

and down the hall a child screams.

 

Passing my time behind the wheel,

everything looks like road work.

What I left calls out of a formless

memory, the voice of a place receding

into the echo of commerce

and cacophony of change.

 

The mid-west, the Lake states suffer

through another cold spring. Too wet

to work the fields, the farms are quiet.

Thousands of men in coveralls, stained only

with past years' sweat, wander across acres

of asphalt to collect in malls, sign over

deeds to developers and entrepreneurs

before turning south, not thoughtlessly,

not without regret, but south.

 

The steering wheel feels firm, but responsive

a purposeful hiss of tires. My eyes drift,

check the shoulders for deer, drift again.

The miles are meaningless, we can never arrive.

The landscapes blend in changing patterns of light,

not perfect, but a metaphor.

 

I pick through the maze of intersections

of another city collapsing, the sprawling subdivisions

and strip malls, the crumbled roads and interrupted sky.

The scraped fields yield their catch of rusted cars,

mobile homes, and golf courses. There is no center,

no town, no place called home,

just the common cracked pavement

spurting out into farm fields

past another motel and all the signs insisting.

-- Joe VanderMeulen

Return to the Index of Synapse 45, Fall 1998