When I was a child, I lived in rural Iowa,
and this is kind of the story about that
and how I came to be a poet.
It's called "A Mile Out of Town."
Can I move this down just a tad?
Good, thanks.
"The Golden Pheasant was the Travelleer,
was the Red Star before that, was
the place my mother tended bar and managed the motel,
was the corner my dad owned the garage and gas station.
One orange night lard caught fire
and burned the Red Star out of our lives,
burned the illegal punch boards and the prizes stacked
under the counters, burned through grease-soaked floors
and blacked all the hamburger buns
stacked in white cellophane boxing.
So we moved from the trailer into the new motel
and lived in the big unit, the one next to the"--
ooh, it's urban.
It's an urban love song--
"the one next to the fuzzing neon
sign that flashed vacancy or no vacancy through the nights.
I learned to ride a bike there in our front yard of red rock
chips, fishtailing and skidding with my mother running
alongside to steady the turns.
And we had a new place to work, the Travelleer, pine and sheet
rock shingle siding and a red roof.
I told my mother goodnight there many times
behind the thick high bar, pushing my way
through the grownups who hugged and gave me whiskey kisses.
There was always a half-breed dog to follow me home.
Before I was in first grade, I was tall enough
to look into the soapy dishwater and dry glasses,
make them squeak.
I could cut French fries with my dad
and lift them in wire baskets out of the hot fat.
When we worked in the kitchen, it meant Cook was drunk,
but he was a good cook and told me stories, his cigarette
sticking to his lip.
He had the only tattoo I'd ever seen,
and I guessed it must have come from the Navy.
The weekends were dance music and cars turning in
from the highway late at night, people puking in the parking
lot, and men standing by pickups talking and laughing
with women, June bugs in the summer frying themselves
on the neon.
We made beds and beds and beds for accordion players,
organ players, and sometimes a three-piece band.
I mostly played alone, was Gene Autry and Roy Rogers,
a football player in white sandals, a paratrooper jumping
off combines and corn pickers with a Blo-Up life
vest for a chute.
I begged my mother for guns and holsters, rifles and footballs.
She thought something was wrong with me.
I never pretended to be a girl or wanted to dress that way.
I imagined skirts into fantasy ritual items
and wore hats to church as tribal garb.
Levi's were all I wanted, and I wore them like a biker
until the dye made my legs blue.
I hurried among adults, mumbling like a radio left on low,
a running, bedraggled pygmy in loose curls,
armed with old sticks, pans, a motley uniform
of pinafore top, brown oxfords, and a red cowboy hat, a coaster
wagon, all of it beginning to talk to itself,
all of it beginning to be a poet, talking to itself.
And every year on the feast of St. Nicholas, out of nowhere,
candy flew through the window, the expected fruit
of believing, of being rooted there, growing up
a mile from Remsen, Iowa, on the two-lane highway
with the tall green corn all around."