If You Visit Our Country


At night, in the little towns that crop up in America
Where the highway curves beside a riverbank
Or lifts you suddenly up a drumlin to the lights
Left burning in closed restaurants and filling stations,
Someone is always walking with a dog, and someone
Is always standing at a window looking pensive.

And if you drive on further through the pensive
Fields and leaning forests of America,
Singing or dreaming, and you share the wheel with someone
You love, you will likely see a bank
Of stars in the west.  Tune to an all-nite station
Playing crazy rock.  The world will be blinking lights

Racing toward you or away, your headlights
Picking up old things along the highway:  pensive
And dilapidated barns, abandoned railroad stations,
The culverts, junkyards, flagpoles of America
That never left the Thirties—the small-town bank
Closed for the Depression, then reopened.  Someone

Is always starting out or starting over; someone
In jeans and open shirt has seen her name in lights
Or told a cowlicked boyfriend he can bank
Upon the future.  In every town a pensive
Father reminisces to his son about America,
Or a priest is walking slowly through the Stations

Of the Cross, praying he might rise above his station
In this anguished life, becoming someone 
Truly worthy, truly, truly worthy.  All across America
You will find embracing lovers under streetlights,
Tiger lilies, Queen Anne's lace, the pensive
Look of high schools closed for summer, empty banks

Of bleacher seats at baseball games; and if you bank
Hard where the highway curves, and if you station
Yourself securely at the wheel, sooner or later pensive
Thoughts will overcome you.  Try to be someone
For whom the country opens, for whom traffic lights
At empty crossroads signify America:

The shades and awnings of America, the kid who banks
A billiard shot, fizzed neon lights, the military station
High on Someone's Bluff, the sentry walking pensive.

-first published in North American Review           

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