Proceed to the Route
Poems by Ruth Bardon
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If I follow the route that’s been shaded in blue it will take me to a town with a name like yours. Perhaps you’ll be there, a child, still sweet, the hardness of your eyes only lightly sketched in and easily erased, just a trail through the grass where a small bike with ribbons has recently raced, just a few dandelions flattened as you ride that could spring back tonight and wait for the sun. I think you’ll be there, and you’ll spin on your toe like a dancer and land and then leap and then run, agile as a cat, all instinct and balance, all its lives intact.
Street View
The GPS directs us to this two-lane road far from the city, miles from the highway. We don’t belong here. It belongs to the locals, and even some of them missed the turn in the dark the first time they came, arrived too late, long after the song, the thin voices joining above the cake, arrived to find a few people leaving, crumbs on the table, but now they know it, the rise, the curve, the stolid barn, the muted sign; they know how the sun fits between those two trees, how later it spreads over three small ponds, and now we’re told to drive three miles more to rejoin the pike, back on our route. The sun, low behind us, paints everything gray, and all we can see is a blur of trees: no barn, no pond, as if somehow the gifts are waiting, unopened, for someone else.
Final Destination
It will tell you you’ve arrived at your final destination so gently, so firmly, that you’ll have to believe it, and this will be a place where you sit inside your home, which is orderly and calm and where everything stays put. You never have to pack or to put things into boxes. You never have to look at a cupboard full of dishes and decide which to discard and which to take with you. You never find the photo that would bring you to tears. Your clothes are light and airy, you move about with ease, the scent of gardenias lingers near the window, and even the bulbs that you planted last fall, whose shoots have just emerged, whose buds have yet to open, will stay just as they are, will never dry or droop or wither as you watch or fall to the ground.
Navigation
For a long time, we resisted. We followed our own ways. We drifted from the route but learned from our mistakes. Then we learned to close our eyes and let it do its work; the earth was a balloon expanded by its breath, swelling and revealing alleys, rivers, kingdoms— the world was big again; it felt like being young— All those years! Wanting more, more, more. My first car was an Olds with a V-8 engine: no airbags, no A/C, no FM radio. I was hungry for the world. I put everything I owned in the back seat and the trunk and had room for two riders who’d help pay for gas. Years went by and then we wanted less, less, less— no houseguests, no rent, no dishes in the sink, no mortgage, no weeds, but now we find we need that small voice in our ear, that cheerful whisper telling us without it we’d be lost.
Proceed to the Route
When the folding chairs have been put away and neatly stacked outside, the guests have gone, the baby shower, the funeral, wedding concluded, you proceed to the route, which means putting one foot in front of the other as you always do, your body compelled to do the same thing, no matter how baffling the terrain.
Address
Garbage in, garbage out, is what I’ve heard, in this case being the misremembered name of an unknown highway. I clearly remember Opposumtown Pike, Three-Chopt Road, Tinker Bell Lane, but that’s no help, suddenly thrown into someone else’s life, following their route from home to work to home as if it were my own. I will drive until I find someone who knows me, who’ll look into my face, tell me who I am, and set me straight.
Directions
They call you from the waiting room, hand you a pink robe. It opens in the back, and it has a small pattern of flowers, or starbursts, or snowflakes, white, and it’s soft and warm as you lie on the bed, and it’s purely a pleasure to follow directions, to raise your arm, to shift your weight; the blanket’s warm too, and nothing has ever felt quite this good, and it just seems sad that you have to be asleep for most of what will follow, when for once you’re perfect, when for once you’ve done it right.
Map
I believe that the river is running beside us even though I can’t see it, and this gives me a taste of what it must be like to believe in God, or ghosts, or the soul. I believe in the river, in the Susquehanna, and in the Alleghenies and the country that rolls up and down, east and west. I believe in GPS. I believe in the science and the minds that built it, no matter why they did it, no matter who profits. I believe that what appears on the screen or through the window or off there in the distance is not all that exists, is only a translation, a sort of rough outline, is only what shows up on the maps we can see.
Topography
The playwright calls attention to the shape of the action, its hills, its peaks, its quiet valleys, the rivers that start as a hint in Act I and rise and flood and spill across the stage, the lines that echo and come back transformed to drench the seats like a sudden storm, the cross-hatched diversions, the blend of the threads, the lighting that spreads and widens and stops, the nap of the cloth, the ooze of the cake, the dust on the wires, the rust on the frames, the scratch of the ropes, the beat of the clock, the birth, the youth, the fruit, the death.
Mountain Road
In the passenger seat, I can help with directions, pointing out the lanes that appear on the screen, how helpful they are, how timely and clear. I emulate them. I’d like to be someone who knows what’s ahead, who knows what to say. But soon, as we climb the rutted mountain road, the GPS fails, and I fail, too, and we come to a stop, thinking hard. We could keep going on. We could try going back. We could fiddle with the map. We could call someone up. Around us the trees hang over the road, which has narrowed so much that it feels like a wall, and we’re on the top, precarious. The roots rise like snakes and cover the road, which arches and dips and turns back on itself. So far, in my life, I’ve found a way out. There’s been someone to call, or help has arrived, but at some point I’ll sit there alone or with others, looking out the window, watching the sun as it sinks in the trees and disappears.
Satellite
Now I own a moon. Now the earth’s my marble. Now the world’s a bauble. Now I’m on a throne. Now I fling my rope up and shimmy like a monkey, one hand, then the next, tugging to the top. Here’s my private perch. Here’s my secret look out. Here’s a vine I swing on. Here’s a rug I ride. Here’s a moon I toss from hand to hand to hand. Here’s a floodlit land. Here’s a world that’s burst.
Ruth Bardon grew up in Highland Park, New Jersey, and lived in a number of midwestern cities before firmly settling in Durham, North Carolina. She received an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1982 and a PhD in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1995. Her poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Boulevard, The Cincinnati Review, New Ohio Review, Salamander, and other journals. She is the author of one full-length poetry collection, Witness (Meadowlark Press, 2024), and two chapbooks, Demon Barber (Main Street Rag, 2020), and
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