Highway, and: Awakening, and: In His Mother's House, and: Wild Fields

22 the minnesota review Michael Atkinson Highway At 21, driving 1-95 northward as the young do best, taking north as the kind of life we secretly become left to ourselves, though becoming was never enough, we longed to remain. From where we rumbled each passing state is like any other, the difference between Florida and New York down to signs, weigh stations, the changes in speed limit. The highway, of course, became its own land aiming north, as young men do best to travel, Scott and I having flown down in the first post-school autumn to escort Chris back north after his father was taken by cancer. A day, 24 hours or so, I can remember but cannot hold, and therefore lost, when we saw the sun sleep and waken on the road as it brought us up from dreaming. At 21, it might've been the best thing I'd ever done, for us all, second perhaps to loving a woman I couldn't have, listening to their sleep night-driving through Georgia's southeast corner, studying the Carolinian farmland I couldn't, and still can't, decide whether to idealize, Scott piloting the giant Marquis into the harvest of Virginia, trying to nail down the mercury blob of radio stations playing Springsteen for us as the sun rose over the distant corn, Atkinson 23 through the mad treetops, the antique industry, the swooping, knotting highways of Baltimore. Some 5000 miles from Aran, where I'd later walk to the cliff-edge I'd dreamt of my whole life, and who knows how many hundred from where I would someday make home, or years from Long Island, its boy in the dark streets, stoking his dreams like a furnace burning wood. The world proved too large, just as the desert cares nothing for what men cross her. I hadn't known, stretching my legs in the morning dew of sleepy roadstop parking lots, that the trip wouldn't ever end, that once we'd begun to move northward, and from ourselves, we'd always be hurtling toward places that escape us, away from the warm, raised fists that kept us young. Chris or Scott might've, I don't know. Soon we knew we were in New York, and since we've been lost since, though the road we traveled was straight as the path of a child's life, from blindess to wonder, and we loved it in our most American way, as the way we wander, following as if it meant our lives the rippling 1300 mile boarder between ourselves and everything. Awakening It is a story my mother loves. How I'm taught the better part of seeing by her, the brightest bread and roses a 3-year-old with crossed-eyes owns tottering out into the July-bathed grass. 24 the minnesota review Born nearly blind and since a fortune in medical bills, I refused to wear the glasses I needed, tossing them away like something I've been released from. Fed up, my mother took me to the side yard, between the chimney and where the two white oaks grow like a giant's heads from a single neck, and lay in the light. Pointing to ants working their lives. "Look. This one's carrying that food to his family; look how much bigger it is than him. These two, see, are fighting over a twig. That one's carrying sand grains like rocks the size of his head, clearing his doorway." Reportedly I looked on, frowning. Out came the glasses. "See, that's the one, with the bit of leaf. His family's waiting for him to come home from work." And I saw. Ants first, first of all, and this seemed funny, years later. Then, the morning, as it was the holy ghost, the sparrow, the diamond one lives to visit once. That vision is the part of us closest to sunlight. How she knew and chose to show me, without wondering, how the matter of it works, how to hunker down and see the quality of light spread on the earth like butter. The grassbed sleeping like the baby...