For twenty five years my mother has quoted the following poem to me:
Lights in the country
marking the spark of Man
patterning and measuring the darkness
with pure life
-pjs, Fall of '68
I was driving through the dark. Or maybe Ann was driving. We were going up to her parents home one weekend, all the way from Iowa City to Waukon. Ann kind of considered me to be her personal possession. We were new freshmen, drama majors, and had met at the preregistration in July before school had even started. It all seemed so auspicious. And when we met again in the fall, she basically proclaimed me as hers.
She was cute. And certainly liked me. She was Catholic, and tried to introduce me to a kind of wine called "Chateau La Salle," which was yellow and came in a unique bottle. I had an aversion to alcohol because of my Baptist upbringing, but I would sip the wine, and drink her Constant Comment tea while the obligatory Leonard Cohen album played in the background.
Me, I didn't think I belonged to anybody, but as we snuggled together on her fold-down couch, it was cosy, and sweet, but I could see wedding bells in her eyes, which really spoils the vision. Soon I got a crush on another drama major, and it was time to escape from being possessed.
But I drove to Waukon with her one weekend with her sister, saw their horses and their land, and when I got home, I wrote up a couple of poems about the trip. One of them is probably lost, or at least forgettable. Even the one quoted above is far from my best, in my opinion. And I've written about three hundred poems since that one. But that poem is the one that my mother recalls to me year after year, visit after visit.
Now she is confined to her bed in the Woodbury Care Center in West Des Moines, and moves in and out of lucidity. But she never fails to bring up that poem. Heaven only knows where Ann is, and I wasted no time in moving out of that possessive relationship into something that was more clearly my choosing. But I owe her one for her part in driving me north through the night one time where the big single lights illuminating many a farmyard inspired me to write a little poem that my mother, at least, knows by heart.
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