|
Exit and Crossing
by J.K. Durick Exit The next one comes up in a mile; the sign mentions Services, the offerings are enough, easy to imagine, Filling stations and mini-marts, a chain motel or two, A shopping mall with acres of half-empty parking; Perhaps I should stop fill the tank, get some coffee There in that store they always attach to gas pumps, Could get in line, watch the comings and goings of This place, whole worlds center on places like this, Families wandering around, guys with six packs and Lottery tickets who know each other talking wisely Of things I, as an outsider, can only pretend to know, Teenagers by the magazine rack, cigarettes smoking, The air filled with routine, familiar with hometown; Perhaps, I could get a room down the road a bit, at a Best Western or Holiday Inn, could check in, check The TV for all its stations, then go down by the pool, Sit there reading a handful of brochures I picked up in The lobby, ads for local attractions, Whispering Cave, Molly’s Pancake House, factory stores selling local Things, candles or soaps or baskets, things I might buy And take with me, drive away, ever sprinkling money; But fully clothed old men by the pool pretending to Read may be too suspicious, so maybe I won’t stop at This exit; maybe I’ll go on to the next one or the next; Highways, like this, become thematic anthologies of American life, each exit another poem, another story, Plain text, dull, monotonously predictable, patterned, Poorly plotted and beautiful for all that; I’d love to Stop by, blend in, become a part of things outside Myself, to stand in line with a six pack and friends, To sit by the pool and watch my family swimming Through the comfortable afternoon, but I drive by; People without lives imagine them, and some of us Create them on paper, keep creating exit after exit. Crossing Of course, we do it when we get to them, like the bridge in the cliché, But I’m talking about highways here, highways four and six lanes deep Where drivers act out their NASCAR fantasies, hell drivers, bumper cars, Where road rage has just become epidemic, and we need to get across. It’s as if highway planners couldn’t imagine us being on the wrong side of All this, there are no buttons to push, no blinking sign to tell what to do, Walk, don’t walk, run, scamper, jump; there is the other side beckoning, Like the promise land, the end of the rainbow, and we must set out unaided. Our newspaper once ran a picture of a sneaker all by itself mid- road, Its owner mistimed, miss-stepped, didn’t look right and left at the same time, Was thrown a distance that’s hard to imagine, his sneaker remained, posed. Crossings, like this, are a matter of timing and a willingness to put it all on The line, the line we sketch out in our heads and then head bravely into it, The other side looms large, the distance isn’t that great, we dash, we dodge, Weave in and out; cars and trucks, buses and vans become a moving maze We wend, we walk. This is what being alone, singled out is like, we are alone Out there, no one knows us anymore, a lone figure surrounded and foolhardy. |
