" I just read this poem in a brand-new collection from Halifax poet John Wall Barger (currently living in Hong Kong), his second collection, Hummingbird (Palimpsest). It’s a gutsy, detail-packed, colorfully lively collection of what could loosely be called "travel poems"--set everywhere from New York and Mexico to Taiwan, India, and Italy. The following is in the sub-genre of childhood on-the-road poems. Notice that a couple of passages are in italics. And, yes, "de-sert" (with hyphen) is part of the poem. The book also includes a couple of Greyhound bus poems, and one set on a Mexican bus." --Brian Bartlett
Away
from the haunted doghouse
from our high shuttered house with the gutters & frogs barking --
between my parents in the blue truck
on the grey highway
we rattled like a bag of tools, an army tank
-- the insides of the blue truck
shiver at my two feel like green bean sprouts
under the DODGE wheel
shiver, wink, spark
like fireflies, gold vines, frog guts, frantic.
Dad rolls down the window,
spits away! The road hacks & coughs right back.
Out back under the mackinaw
are my Tinker Toys & Lincoln Logs. Telephone poles
are stickmen with broken kites.
Dad flattens his fingers
on radio buttons, one knuckle
a triangle, I've been through the de-sert
on a horse with no name, now his sore pinky taps
my knee, my mother Jean winces at it,
sews some more, It felt good to be out of the rain . . .
Her hands on needles & canvas
are warm carrots --
she smells like sunlight, mint,
she smells quiet today,
glad maybe to sew our future tipi home in Nova Scotia.
Away empty doghouse!
Away crooked rope swing!
Far from here anyway, this blue truck,
this boundless bobbing line
of electric thread,
my left eye fixed on a crystal nick
in the windshield.
--John Wall Barger
