500 miles to Fargo, Specks in the rear-view mirror & The limit
by Erika Lorentzsen
[ poetry - april 05 ]
500 miles to Fargo
The jug, the kazoo buzz,
watching you shuck corn husks,
light dusk. I think of you,
an easy rider - brown cords,
white tee, Spanish boots.
Oh, we dream
of hopping trains,
the slow way,
harmonica in B, flat
pennies on rails,
L & N, NP, BN
hankering down tracks.
Chug, chug, honey we got all day
long across the big sea Dakota.
We break at the tavern
play pool, feel fine.
I drink whiskey,
you have a coke.
Cheers, to the hole
in my sock. Cheers,
to the great big one,
on the sole of your shoe.
My, my, I’d say, my God,
remember when, preacher boy,
you called me the prodigal girl.
We looked out on the big sea sky
doughy blue and me,
me and you at the Cassleton
whistle-stop, clapping hands,
beagled-eyed. Singing
Dakota laments
at the limit.
Specks in the rear-view mirror
One thing that distinguishes a frontier
is the precarious nature of human hold on it.
- Kathleen Norris
Teetering on the edge of marriage,
platinum, gold rings, exchanges of ownership,
I've tried to nail down how it was
that neither he nor I could ever be sure
of each other. Certainly, he tossed snow dust
making prisms spur up in hard-to-love places.
Yet, it's never how I imagined.
The cool guy standing in
the back of the movie theater,
who looks like someone
stark in the middle of the scene -
a twin relief for ideas I had of me -
that man never existed. Sunday matinees
on Main Street get darker every winter
with each passing year. I keep
running backwards looking in the rear-view
mirror, where sometimes you appear
mixed in with frontier style steely hair.
Some little girl fantasy I had that's now clear.
The limit
In the fall, stones roll over to
their positions and each new passion
builds onto itself a resistance
another cruel effect that's different
and consistent with the frozen world
spread out, disturbed, building layer upon
layer of ice curves. Each time your
arch pulls one way another leaps
the other way. Yellow timber
smolders in the fire, butter melts
in the pot and firecracker sizzles
escaping. Sorrel ground doesn't stand
up; it sits down indifferent
to the winter. Snow, sleet and rain
fall on creases in the floor.
The earth doesn't attain
the same limits the sky poses
brandishing its flimsy cloak of bright blue.
