Found in Willow Springs 76
Back to Author Profile
Like a diplomat with an assassin
closing in, I never take
the same way home twice
through Topeka streets,
making string figure, stairstep
and spiral through neighborhoods
split and stitched across railroad
track, highway and river,
a new fugue for each journey.
I've never known anyone's body
as well as I learn those roadways
of the late 1980s, each turn the turn
an idea makes, luck-damaged
and sprawled. Make of that what you will.
I myself have never understood it,
how that unremarkable American grid
compels me to connect each street
with the bouquet of song I understand
clearest through battery-animated
cassettes unspooling
in passenger side boombox. And wider,
beyond the city, I want to hear
the whole concept album of Kansas,
drive to college towns for art and donuts,
remote chapels, the ice cream store north
with its one pinball machine featuring KISS.
I have a travel placemat from before
the interstate recommending stops
along scenic hi-way 24 including Topeka,
where at the Ira Price Cafe
½ mile east of the cloverleaf junction
breakfast is served any hour, and chicken
is a specialty. It closes at 9 p.m. on Saturday
and opens in time for church
but other than that is air-conditioned and modern
24 hours a day. Maps seem earnest,
even though expulsive, and experience
may not corroborate.
The people in the little houses of Kansas
look out windows and nothing
invisible is real. There is, the placemat
assures me, plenty of parking.
