| CROSS COUNTRY TRIP By Janet McCann CROSS COUNTRY TRIP Signs on the highway, next exit The marionette museum! The bargain outlet! The ice cream factory! But you do not turnAnd you think, maybe you need never exit, Just ride down this highway, stopping at Oases of gas and keychains and donutsAnd tasteless burgers, even sleep there At the rest stops, start up again at dawn. Once when I’d committed to something unpleasantI was told, “You need to think of an exit strategy,” but I couldn’t, and finally the enterprise collapsed Leaving me gasping on the shoulder. If I kept drivingI would get used to the inrush and outrush of strangers At each stop, prefer one donut to another, Speak to the vendors like old friends. In the carI would listen to the world. Cruise control Would allow me never to have to speed or slow And I’d be aware that if I wanted to talk with someoneI could, though probably I would never do it. Year after year of driving, until the final exit I n the middle of nowhere, highway’s end. REGRETS IN B FLATI understand the drive to hoard, Hoard anything: cats, newspapers, Every book I ever read, buttons, photos–I am not exactly a hoarder, you can Get around my house without crawling Over boxes, but the rooms are roundBecause the corners are full, and there are bags Of clothes in closets marked “Salvation Army” That never seem to get there, and no oneAnyway would want the big pink robe ( I certainly didn’t) or the Tarot Deck That’s missing the Queen of Cups.It is sad and hard to move out of a life And into something else, whether the future Chose you or you it. Last night I dreamedAll the walls fell away, and all my things Went sailing out in a swirling greeny wind. I lay on the floorboards in the empty roomFeeling bereft and free, without even a pillow. TO THE DESIGNERthe world must be a touch screen. anything and anyone you want. would it be boring. touch the gray sky and say blue. dial back yesterday and the children’s parade with drums and horns. touch your face, call back your hair. lift your tired breasts. now it is 1945 and daddy is back from the war, gray faced but whole. everything has a shimmer on it. you can be in Russia for the turn of the old century. does it matter, this shimmering surface. will some day the screen go blank or will it just go on like this for you, the world an unformed welter forever and every day. not a day but a fish-flicker of time, of endless here. THE GRANDFATHER I NEVER METI finish William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience as my grandfather did one hundred years ago. The book was new, he had to cut the pages . He must have hurried, some pages are ill-cut, some pages carry a slash of the facing page.It says 4/13/16 in his round hand. My grandmother would have been pregnant with my father, would have birthed him when the leaves turned. As he read, he would have called her in to read her passageswhich he marked with one, two, or three checks depending on importance. She was pretty and vague, she would have nodded, setting forth plates, thinking about the baby inside her, worrying about money.He would have read it every night until he’d finished, reading bits and writing comments: Read this. True. This is very human. He’d almost drowned in a swamp when he was ten, I have the article. When he was fifty-onehe killed himself, using both gun and rope. His father was an alcoholic butcher, my father was an alcoholic chemist and this man, in the middle, a nondrinking Methodist, and they all failed one another.In the wedding photo grandfather ‘s young face is beautiful, gentled by innocence and faith. My grandmother beside him luminous too, the chaste pearls beneath the lush corona of her hair.I never met him but I knew her well; she lived forty more years in poverty and bitterness, dodging a child’s questions as she uncoiled the golden braid each night and set her pearls—she kept them! on this book. |
| Journals publishing Janet McCann’s work include KANSAS QUARTERLY, PARNASSUS, NIMROD, SOU’WESTER, AMERICA, CHRISTIAN CENTURY, CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE, NEW YORK QUARTERLY, TENDRIL, and others. A 1989 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship winner, she taught at Texas A & M University from 1969-2016, is now Professor Emerita. She has co-edited anthologies with David Craig, ODD ANGLES OF HEAVEN (Shaw, 1994), PLACE OF PASSAGE (Story Line, 2000), and POEMS OF FRANCIS AND CLARE (St. Anthony Messenger, 2004). Most recent poetry collection: THE CRONE AT THE CASINO (Lamar University Press, 2014). |