there is a dip in the highway
just south of where the trees break
and the grocery stores, two corners two,
look like monuments of near past,
not old enough to erode into the earth,
but not young enough for people to care
or believe in their sales of soda.
between Lexington and change,
our women weep of the wars they keep,
and the men tend to drink or leave,
or stay and perish within the same
mundane Mondays that snatched their
grand fathers long ago, before the internet,
before the realization that beyond
North Elkhorn Creek there is something
big, something untenable to most.
the heros and heroines of this neck
of the woods are those who sing
folk songs from other porches, place
vases of flowers on other refrigerators,
break the hearts of poets in other cities;
they are not those who are hang around
and fade into the minutia and these leaves
in the same frontyards of which they were borne.
there is a dip in the highway
just south of where the fields interrupt
the horizon, and this is where the kids
on the school buses all stand and shout
Wheeeee! as if the bus is suspended
in the air, in time, just for a split second,
before going to school or heading home
where all the clocks continue to tick-tock,
reminding the bears and the babies their state of being.