Looking Back

May 3 2011

I was young, that summer,

yet already feeling

life had passed me by.

Looking back

at the kids I once ignored,

who’d gone shooting right past me

suddenly so grown-up.

We are like generals

fighting the last war,

our plumed and polished cavalry

in their bright red coats

picked-off by bare-foot farm boys

concealed in the tree-tops.

Stuck in the past,

like Custer, and Maginot.

I drove west

across the prairie alone,

the car crusted with bugs

filthy with dusty

sheet metal hot as a fry pan.

“Fly over country”, it’s been called

the land-locked heart of a continent,

far from the teeming coasts

where life goes on.

And not as flat as I thought

but rolling like an ocean of soil,

the treeless plain

where the ghosts of buffalo thunder

and rivers run slow.

Indian wars, and wagon trains,

and bleached white bones

interred in an inch of soil.

I mostly remember the sky,

unbelievably high

and everything puny

beneath it.

Technicolor light,

with storm clouds

I watched coming my way

for days, it seemed.

And asphalt, going soft in the sun

laid out like a ruler across the landscape,

a line on a map

drawn by some hell-or-high-water surveyor.

Until the car felt motionless

with the land scrolling by beneath it.

And me, feeling claustrophobic inside,

angling my neck

to gawk at the sky
out the slit of windshield. 

And now, much older, I’m still looking back.

Heading into the setting sun,

my eyes firmly fixed

on the rear-view mirror.

I was listening to Sheila Rogers interview  Elizabeth Hay on her new novel Alone in the Classroom. Something she said inspired me to write this. They were talking about her inexplicable attraction to Saskatchewan (to which she's returned in a couple of novels), and its unappreciated beauty.  In particular, she made a comment about the myth of "flatness":  that the prairie is actually rarely flat. (And in fact, what defines it as prairie is not its flatness, but its treelessness.) It brought up some memories, and that's what set me off on this poem.

I've only driven once across the prairies. And it was decades ago. But some very powerful images still endure. I quit enjoyed the exercise of trying to convey them in this compressed poetic form.

I shake my head at how young I was on that trip, and yet how I was even then afflicted with this persisting feeling of missing out; of growing up too late; of being far too pre-occupied by regret and recrimination over the irretrievable past. This is the sub-text of the piece:  weaving through it, as well as beginning and ending it.