Listening to Son Volt on the Ride Home
.
When I say the ride home
I mean south.
When I say the ride home, I mean
dry open rough. South
and a little east
out of the rainforest disgorged
until the swells of yellow
flatten out.
Until the grass grows so desiccated
it sounds like radio static.
I want to take up smoking again
so I can drag a cigarette down to its filter
and carry the butt in my breast pocket
all the way to Pendleton
run it under the tap at a filling station
leave it in the shine and scum
of a restroom basin.
This part of the country simmers in its dry rub.
My love drives and wonders what I must be thinking.
I am daydreaming about Jeff Tweedy
and the ghost of Jay Farrar
duking it out on the mesa. Really going at it.
Their work boots kicking up a dust storm.
Of course I am rooting for the ghost of Jay Farrar,
uncorrupted by stardom.
I can’t tell my love because he’ll remind me
that Jay Farrar is still
alive. In fact,
he just released a new album. And I need to pretend
for the rest of this drive that Jay Farrar was always
too pure for this world
or how else can I explain his voice like a cupboard
with empty shelves
or the haunted tread of his fingerprints
as they move up the neck of his guitar.
Allisa Cherry’s poetry has appeared in TriQuarterly, The Penn Review, The Journal, The Baltimore Review, and Rust + Moth. She is the recent recipient of the Wheelbarrow Books poetry prize awarded by the RCAH Center for Poetry and her book An Exodus of Sparks is forthcoming from MSU Press. She lives in the Pacific Northwest where she completed her MFA at Pacific University, teaches workshops for immigrants and refugees transitioning to a life in the United States, and is an associate poetry editor for West Trade Review.
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