last love song at the valentine

"Then we walked across town to the Valentine Drive-In Theater, where the marquee read CLOSED FOR THE SEASON. The lightbulbs had been unscrewed and the trailer was empty. Harmon and Nina were climbing a glacier in Manitoba." -- Mark Winegardner.

Indiana has 23 drive-ins, down from 120. More major highways intersect in the state than any other, so picture the pull-offs, the tired travelers, the white posts spread out in the remains of corn fields.

We meant to go to the Star-Lite, which we later learned is only five miles south of Bloomington, but we ended up at the Holiday, a 45 minute drive. What's wonderful is that we could set out, on a clear night in the Midwest, driving with the windows down, the sun blushing the clouds on our right, that we could pass limestone factories and giant boots and 24-hour diners, thinking we were headed for one drive-in and end up, anyway, without turning or adjusting, at another. That alternate universe feeling. We let the mulchy fresh air in and watched the little girls prance, as I did once, in pretty pink ruffled nightgowns. We watched kids dance in the back of pick-up trucks and families toss footballs in elliptical arcs over the screen. We asked the enormous vehicles not to settle in front of us please, and tried to guess the date of the concession stand commercials. Earlier that morning, I had navigated the longest underground river in the States, ducked my head under stalactites the color of clay and strained my eyes for the blind crayfish. On the way home, leaning to the window to measure the quantity of stars, the two experiences seemed to balance each other out.

Movies I've Seen at the Drive-In (A Beginning)
Snow White
Sleeping Beauty
Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid
Terminator II
Sommersby
Water World
The Matrix

tracy and i are going to start playing with the prose poem and this is a throat clearing

Jimmy Martin, King of Bluegrass

Today I am wearing on my shirt the face of a musician who is dead. I have never heard the invisible chords of his blue grass break sound into the new word, which means joy in sadness or sadness in joy. A displaced ancestor falls from the family tree, his love of banjo imprinted on a gene now notated, unalterably, in the pattern of my body. The air vibrates. On my shirt the musician's face is a negative, his sensory organs gently blank. His undepicted fingers pluck until outside thunder bursts like a rolling barrel in the sky, and the song becomes rain that washes everything away. The bright flash of lightning is electricity halting the car on its way to Boulder; is the tornado warning crackling in the gulley between two towns named for long-dead settlers; is the white light of the afterlife; is the sharpened knife-gleam of forgetting I carry in my mind from break-of-day to fizzle. Is itself: lightning, illuminating the Bloomington sky. My hand goes to my heart, conceals the musician's face. Presses him into my chest as if to mark my skin. To record imagined music, memory that never was.

along the creek path

1. Ants are tenacious. Especially the little ones, holding fast to the stamen of a voluptuous white flower that fell from a flowering tree hidden from view. And though the flower desperately wants to be tucked behind an ear, ants do not mix well with human hair.

2. A lifeguard t-shirt is strangely out of place in the prairie, its wearer keeping watch over a sea of green.

3. Empty shoes next to a shallow creek are not necessarily an ominous sign. The water ripples gently over protruding rocks. The owner is nowhere in sight. The owner's socks are of the tiny white ankle variety.

4. Toddlers are the only ones who can look sweet holding their bums while shuffling across a field.

Shh...