Barter: POEMS

An Uplifting Story

34 An Uplifting Story It’s so muggy out the person next door is clamming up inside us. I say we because of cheap linguistic theory. But I want to insert something personal, to get over the rough spots, to get closer, to pan in, to take the long view, to acquire professional assistance—these are other options. Personally, if I hadn’t left my ex-wife for the present tense, I’d still be carrying mother with me and all her worries, locked doors, the lies, sleeping in my nightshirt, getting up to vacuum. Some wrong turns argue for necessity. I’m not in love with the word spurious, but there’s no other way to get there. Ohio was happy to be Ohio, where all the smiling faces in the windows weren’t mine. I was driving west, the way they do in literature when crossing a frontier, my possessions were spilling out of the back of the truck, so what could I do but turn around and stop shouting at her—as if she’d been wrong for being her— and look for signs: they were less towns than dots on a map when you didn’t have your glasses, so you had to guess and settle on a position while sweating through your shirt and trying to make nothing out of cornfield after cornfield. I hated the thickness and the flatness, the stasis of being yourself too long, being driven by a woman you could hardly look at, no less see.The way it darkened before my eyes, fireflies and frogs and rubber tires in the burning fields, I thought how certain tribes set fire to their furniture once a year, just to get my mind off it. But now, for Midwesterners, a more uplifting story. 35 A few years later I was looking out from a camp on Frenchman’s Bay, and another woman, another way of looking at it, was cooking something, something else I’d never thought to ask for. ...