A Collection of Short Stories by I-15
Reading at 80
seeing the pages of a short-story collection flipping past as if a giant,
asphalt thumb
were bending, then releasing, the page corners.
Lethargic miles and miles of sage, undulating fences, and baked
cheat grass
zip fast forward at the edges of my vision.
Yet,
there,
at the edge of the blacktop,
among the paper and plastic,
a loose collection of
ubiquitous and out-of-place leavings
prods my nodding consciousness to mark
the winking of a baker’s dozen
abandoned stories.
A pacifier on a frayed pink ribbon
hanging
from the branches of a Black Sage…
A trail of black rubber ribbons, starting small and ending
with a weighty cork-screw of tread and
two deep, half-moon gouges
slashing across three lanes of gray tarmac…
A pair of cat-eye sunglasses with rhinestones and
only one earpiece;
a fleeting moment later,
a single length of torn fishnet hose
snagged
by a
jagged barb
on a
sagging fence…
One half of a king-sized, pillow-top mattress
slumped against a fence post
branded in the middle
with the squiggly edges
of long-dried, overlapping puddles….
The bloating carcass of a raccoon,
punctuated
2 seconds later by one small, barely recognizable
coon-colored mound
and then another
and another…
A 4-foot length
of splintered, peeling plank
with a C-clamp clinging
resolutely to a ragged edge
kept company by two bent and rusted 10-penny nails…
Just one,
size 10 or larger,
spit-shined Mary-Jane with a
hole in the sole
and a pink rose for a strap button...
A lopsided, delaminating cardboard box
the size and shape of a casket
with the “This Side Up” arrow
pointing down…
A book with a corner chewed off,
the spine broken,
and the pages open and wafting
with the car’s passing.
This one deserved, and got, an anguished look back…
A black, lacy strap
spilling from the mouth
of a wrinkled, brown-paper wine bag…
With an endless,
treeless horizon on every side,
a weighty broken limb
from a Ponderosa Pine,
flying a yellow “CAUTION” pennant
from the splintered end,
the needles still green…
A pocked, aluminum, round-bottom
cooking pot,
mouth to the ground,
turned-wood handle trailing,
looking for all the world
like a naked,
Fess Parker
coon-skin cap…
A green marble 1940’s cosmetic suitcase,
nearly buried,
upside-down and tilted on one corner,
one hinge and the plastic handle broken,
trailing a mouse path leading into the alfalfa field on the far
side of the fence…
The miles vaporize in the vortex behind me,
while the mental snapshots swirl and coalesce.
Stories emerge and evolve and evaporate
on this eternal stretch of I-15...
I am both
constrained and entertained.
3 comments:
I love how it begins - and the "stories" are described in such a way that they become clear, focused pictures in my mind - pictures I can create my own stories for.
It makes me miss long seemingly empty stretches of road through the sage. Wonderful.
My favorite is the last line: I am both constrained and entertained. To me it is an allusion to the fact that your imagination is constrained by what is by the road (i.e. if there is no clown shoe by the side of the road, you are constrained to clown-free thoughts), and your imagination is also constrained TO the road.
I also like the image of these pieces of story getting caught up behind the car like in the vortices behind airplane wings.
I like how each stanza is short. The structure conveys a rhythm and feel to what you see out the window of the car. There are so many images that I had to read it through a few times to really appreciate everything in the poem. I especially like the lines "Stories emerge and evolve and evaporate on this eternal stretch of I-15."
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