Untitled Document
newyearspoem 2007 #1
I should
know
by
now
I can’t
get
my life
in order
by making
lists
©Jacqueline Jackson 2006
American Life in Poetry
How many of us, when passing through some small town,
have felt that it seemed familiar though we’ve never been there
before. And of course it seems familiar because much of the course of life
is pretty much the same wherever we go, right down to the up-and-down
fortunes of the football team and the unanswered love letters. Here’s
a poem by Mark Vinz.
Driving Through
This could be the town you’re from, marked only by what it’s near. The gas station man speaks of weather and the high school football team just as you knew he would —
kind to strangers, happy to live here.
Tell yourself it doesn’t matter now, you’re only driving through. Past the sagging, empty porches locked up tight to travelers’ stares, toward the great dark of the fields, your headlights startle a flock of old love letters — still undelivered, enroute for years.
Reprinted from Red River
Blues, published by College of the Mainland,
Texas City, TX, 1977, by permission of the author. Copyright © 1977 by
Mark Vinz, whose most recent book is Long
Distance (Midwestern Writers Publishing
House, 2005). This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The
Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of
Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.
Ted Kooser served as the U.S. Poet Laureate from
2004-2006. For more information, go to www.americanlifeinpoetry.org.
This article appears in Jan 4-10, 2007.
